Last Things

1: Returning Home

AS the car passed the first houses away from London Airport (the September night had closed down, lights shone from windows, in the back seat one heard the grinding of the windscreen wiper) Margaret said: ‘Is there anything waiting for us?’

‘I hope not.’

She meant, bad news. It was the end of a journey, the end of a holiday, coming home. We had each of us felt that edge of anxiety all our lives: not only when there was something to fear in a homecoming, but when, as now, there was no cause at all. As a child of eight, I had rushed from the day’s outing full of dread, back to my mother’s house, expecting what fatality I couldn’t name. I had known that happen often enough since, and so had Margaret. It used to get hold of me, coming home across the Channel, just about the time that I could see the cliffs. But that was a long time ago, before the war: travel had changed by now: and, if it was going to happen – often it didn’t, but that night Margaret and I were trapped by the old habit – it was along the motorway, the Airport left behind.

Yes, people had learned to call it angst, appropriating a stronger word. In fact, this state, except that it hadn’t a cause, was much more like what games-players called the needle, or what others felt when they went into an examination room or knew they were due to make a speech. Curiously enough, the top performers never lost it. You had to be a little nervous, so they said, to be at your best. It wasn’t all that dreadful. One learned to live with it. And perhaps, as one grew older, it was a positive reassurance to find the nerves at one’s elbows tightening and to be reminded that it was possible to be as keyed up as one used to be.

Still, Margaret was unusually silent, not leaving much interval between cigarettes, willing the car into London. It wouldn’t have soothed her, or me either, to tick off the worries and reason them away. The neon names of factories high above the road: the standard airport journey, it might have been anywhere in the world: point A to point B, the topology of our time. It was familiar to us, but it seemed long. The eastbound traffic in the Cromwell Road was thick for eight o’clock at night.

In Queens Gate, bars of gold on the streaming pavements. A wait at the park gates. The glint of the Serpentine, the dark trees. At last, our block of flats.

Margaret said, ‘The driver will help you in, I’ll go ahead.’ While I was bringing the bags out of the lift, I saw our door open and heard her voice and the housekeeper’s. All was well, came loud Italian repetitions. Margaret’s father – no, no bad news. All was well. A letter from Mr Maurice waiting for her. A postcard from Mr Charles. All was well. The housekeeper embraced the whole of Margaret’s family sense and obligations.

In the drawing-room, lamps reflected in the black sky over the park, Margaret and I exchanged sheepish smiles. Pouring out drinks, she said, ‘Well, there doesn’t seem anything disastrous for the moment, does there?’ She was touching wood, but she was happy. We sat on the sofa, the bright pictures welcoming us, letters on the coffee table close beside our glasses; as the last reflex of the journey home, she riffled through them, but left them still unopened. If there had been anything wrong with her father, there would have been a message from Helen. He was too much an invalid to leave alone, and her sister had come to London to be on call, so that we could take our holiday. It had been our first holiday by ourselves for months or years. It was peaceful, but also strange, to sit there in the empty flat.

Any earlier summer, one of the boys or both would have been returning with us. Margaret leaned back, her colour quite returned. Neither of us wanted to stir. At last she picked out an envelope from the pile, the letter from Maurice, her son by her first marriage.

She read, eyes acute but without expression. Then she broke out, ‘He seems very well and cheerful.’ She looked at me with delight: she knew that I, like everyone in the family, was fond of Maurice. As for her, her face was softened, love shining through, and a curious kind of pride, or even admiration.

The letter, which was several pages long, came from nowhere more remote than Manchester. Maurice was working as an assistant in a mental hospital. Without complaint. Without self-concern – though, as he had done it before in vacations, he knew there weren’t many more menial jobs. It was that lack of self-concern which Margaret admired, and might have wished for in herself and hers. Yet there was a twist here. For the truth was, she didn’t really like it. All her family were clever, people who might denounce life’s obstacle race and yet, as it were absent-mindedly, contrived to do distinctly well at it. Maurice, her first child, whom she loved with passion, happened to be a sport. As a child, he had looked as though his temperament was going to be stormy: and then in adolescence (the only boy I had ever seen change that way round) he became more tranquil than any of us.

He was not in the least clever. He had that summer failed his examinations, for the second year running, at Cambridge. She had hoped that he might become a doctor, but that was out. Maurice himself accepted it with his usual gentle amusement. He thought he ought to try to be as useful as he could. ‘I don’t know much,’ he had said, talking of the hospital, ‘but I suppose I can look after them a bit.’

In secret, Margaret was distracted. She knew that his friends, as mystified as she was, were beginning to believe that he was one of nature’s innocents or saints. But could you bear your favourite child to be one of nature’s saints?

Meanwhile, I had been reading the postcard from Charles, her son and mine. He was not at all innocent, and he was extremely able. He looked older than his half-brother, though he was still not seventeen. He had had a brilliant career at school, and had decided, independent, on his own, to spend a year abroad before he went to Cambridge. He was writing from Bucharest. ‘Romanian is interesting, but I’d better economise on languages if I’m going to have one or two good enough. People won’t talk Russian here; and when they do aren’t usually very competent. Plum brandy is the curse of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, standards of primness – behind closed doors – markedly and pleasingly low.’ It reminded me of the postcards I used to receive from another bright young scholar, Roy Calvert, a generation before.

‘Well,’ I said, after Margaret had passed over Maurice’s letter, ‘you pay your money and you take your choice.’

I was pretending that I was more detached than she was. She knew better.

For herself; Margaret couldn’t help remembering Charles as an affectionate small boy. Now he was as self-willed as we had been. In the past she had imagined the time when her sons were grown up, and nothing but a comfort. She said, realism deserting her, ‘If only each of them could give the other a little of what he doesn’t have.’

She was harking back to them, reading Maurice’s letter again (would he look after his health?), as we picked our way through the rest of the mail. Five or six days of it. The ordinary professional letters. An invitation from the Lester Inces for the following weekend. A note from the wife of my nephew Pat, married that summer, child expected in January, hoping to see Margaret. Invitations to give lectures. Letter from a paranoid, asking for help against persons persecuting her by means of wireless messages. Two lines on a postcard from old George Passant, sent from Holland. Agenda of a meeting.

That was all. Nothing exciting, I said. That was the last thing we wanted, said Margaret, as we went in to eat at leisure, by ourselves.

We had arrived back on Tuesday. The next Monday morning we were again returning home, this time in a train, autumn fields bland in the sunshine, no shadow over us: in fact, in contented, mocking spirits, amused by the weekend. For we hadn’t been able to resist the Inces’ invitation. Margaret’s sister had been willing to stand in for another week, I was glad of a little grace before I started a new book. More than that, we had been inquisitive. The young took up our attention now, and it was a relaxation to have a look at middle-aged acquaintances.

In fact, it turned out fun to see Lester Ince installed in his second avatar, in his recently established state. It was, as it had unrolled before our eyes those last two days, a remarkable state. He had run off – or she had done the running off – with an American woman who was not merely rich, but, as her friends said, rich-rich. They had raced through their divorces in minimum time, and they had simultaneously been looking for a stately home. They had found it: one of the most famous and stateliest of homes: nothing less than Basset. Basset, where Diana Skidmore used to perform as a great hostess, and where Margaret and I, though nowhere near the smart life, had sometimes been among the guests. But that had been in the fifties, getting on for a decade ago (this was 1964), and Diana had got tired of it. No one seemed to be certain why, but, just as decisively as she once talked to ministers, she announced that she had had enough, and closed the house within a month. She was reported to be living, quite simply, in a London flat, seeing only her oldest friends. Basset had stayed empty for several years.

Then came the Inces. They had heard of it: they inspected it: they bought it. Together with associated farms, tenantry, trout streams, pheasant-shooting and outspread acres. Basset had become more opulent, so the knowing ones said, than ever in its history; Margaret and I had regarded it all, that weekend, with yokel-like incredulity, or perhaps more like American Indians confronted with the twin miracles of Scotch whisky and firearms. In my less stupefied moments, I had been trying to work out how many hundred thousands of pounds they had spent.

Lester Ince as landowner. Lester Ince in a puce smoking jacket, at the head of his table in the great eighteenth-century dining-room, ceiling by Thornhill: Lester pushing the decanter runners round, after the women had left us. Well, one had to admit, there were considerable bonuses. The food in Diana’s time had always been skimpy, and usually dim. Not now. There used not to be enough to drink. Lester Ince, who remained a hearty and a kindly man, had taken care of that.

Still, it seemed a slight difference of emphasis away from the Lester Ince who was a junior fellow of my old college only ten years before. He had written a highly regarded work on the moral complexities in Joseph Conrad: but his utterances, almost as soon as he was elected, had been somewhat unexpected. He had surveyed his colleagues, and decided that he didn’t think much of them. Francis Getliffe was a stuffed shirt. So was my brother Martin. The best college hock Lester firmly described as cat’s pee. The comfortable worldliness of Arthur Brown was even less to his taste. ‘I should like to spill the crap about this joint,’ someone reported him saying in the combination room: at that stage, he had a knack of speaking what he thought of as American demotic.

As a result of this kind of trenchancy, he became identified as one of the academic spokesmen of a new wave. This was protest. This was one of the voices of progressive opinion. Well, there seemed a slight difference of emphasis now.

To a good many, particularly to those who couldn’t help finding leaders and then promptly losing them, the conversation at Basset that weekend might have been disconcerting. This used to be one of the major political houses. A number of ministerial careers had been helped, or alternatively hindered, in Diana Skidmore’s drawing-room. It was possible that policies – though did any of us know how policies were really made, in particular the persons who believed they made them? – had at least been deviated. Basset was not a political house any longer. But, in spite or because of that, it had become far more ideological than it had ever been. Diana’s Tory ministers hadn’t indulged much in ideology: the Inces and their friends were devoted to it. The old incumbents didn’t talk about the Cold War: now, there were meals when the Basset parties talked of nothing else.

That was election autumn, both in America and England. Ince’s wife thought that we were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the merits of Senator Goldwater. He mightn’t have everything, but at least he wasn’t soft on Communism. As for our general election, if the Conservatives didn’t come back, there was a prospect of ‘confiscatory taxation’, a subject on which Lester Ince spoke with poignant feeling.

Once or twice we had a serious argument. Then I grew bored and said that we had better regard some topics as forbidden. Lester Ince was sad; he believed what he said, he believed that, if they listened, people of goodwill would have to agree with him. However, he was not only strong on hostly etiquette, he was good-natured; if the results of his political thinking put us out, then we ought to be excused from hearing them. ‘In that case, Lew,’ he said, with a cheerful full-eyed glint from his older incarnation, ‘you come to my study before you change, and we’ll have a couple of snifters and you can talk about the dear old place.’

He meant the college, for which, though it had treated him well, he still felt a singular dislike. In actual truth, he had altered much less than others thought, less even than he thought himself. Protest? Others had been sitting in the places he wanted. Now he had settled his ample backside in just those places, and it was for others to protest. When young men seemed to be rebelling against social manners, I used to think, it meant that they would, in the end, not rebel against anything else.

In the train, Margaret and I agreed that we each had a soft spot for him. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that one saw an old acquaintance living like a millionaire. As the taxi took us home from Waterloo, we were thinking of persons, acquaintances of his roughneck years, who might profitably be presented with the spectacle of the new-style Basset. The game was still diverting us as we entered the flat.

Beside the telephone, immediately inside the hall, there stood a message on the telephone pad. It read, with the neutrality and unsurprisingness of words on paper:

Mr Davidson (Margaret’s father) is seriously ill. Sir Lewis is asked for specially, by himself. Before he goes to the clinic, please call at 22 Addison Road.

As with other announcements that had come without warning, this seemed like something one had known for a long time.

2: God’s Own Fool

IN Addison Road, Margaret’s sister was staying with some friends. As she kissed me, her expression was grave with the authority of bad news. Silently she led me through the house, down a few steps, into a paved garden. It was not yet half past eleven – I had not been inside my flat for more than minutes – and the sky was pearly with the morning haze. She said: ‘I’m glad you came.’

For a long time, we had not been easy with each other. She had been stern against Margaret’s broken marriage, and put most of the blame on to me. All that was nearly twenty years before, but Helen, who was benign and tender, was also unforgiving: or perhaps, like some who live on the outside uneventful lives, she made dramas which the rest of us wanted to coarsen ourselves against. She was in her early fifties, five years older than her sister: she had had no children, and her face not only kept its youth, like all the others in her family, but did so to a preternatural extent. It was like seeing a girl or very young woman – with, round her eyes, as though traced in wax, the lines of middle age. She dressed very smartly, which that morning, as often, seemed somehow both pathetic and putting-off: but then it didn’t take much to make me more uneasy with her, perhaps because, when I had been to blame, I hadn’t liked being judged.

She was looking at me with eyes, like Margaret’s, acute and beautiful. She hadn’t spoken again: then suddenly, as it were brusquely, said: ‘Father tried to kill himself last night.’

As soon as we read the message, Margaret – distressed that he didn’t want her – had tried to find an explanation: and so had I, on the way here. But, obtusely so it seemed later, neither of us had thought of that.

‘He asked me to tell you. He said it would save unnecessary preambles.’

That sounded like Austin Davidson first-hand. I hadn’t met many men as uncushioned or as naked to life. He despised the pretences that most of us found comforting. He despised them for himself, but also for others, quite regardless of what anyone who loved him might feel. That morning Helen said (she had lavished less care on him than had Margaret), almost in his own tone, ‘He’s never thought highly of other people’s opinion, you know.’

She told me how it had happened. As we all knew, he had been in despair about his illness. Until his sixties, he had lived a young man’s life: then he had a thrombosis, and he had been left with an existence that he wouldn’t come to terms with. A less clear-sighted man might have been more stoical. Austin Davidson, alone in Regent’s Park except for Margaret’s visits, had sunk into what they used to call accidie. A tunnel with no end. There had been remissions – but his heart had weakened more, he could scarcely walk, and at last, at seventy-six, he wouldn’t bear it. Somehow – Helen didn’t know how – he had accumulated a store of barbiturates. On the previous evening, Sunday, about the time that I was drinking pre-dinner ‘snifters’ with Lester Ince, he had sat alone in his house, writing notes to his daughters. Then he had swallowed his drugs, washed them down with one whisky, and stood himself another.

But he had done it wrong. He had taken too much. A few hours later, stupefied by the drug, he had staggered about, violently sick. While vomiting, he had fallen forward, gashing his forehead against the handle of the WC. Near by, he had been discovered at breakfast time, covered with blood but still alive. They had driven him to the –– clinic.

‘Fortunately,’ said Helen, ‘he seems to be surprisingly well. I don’t know whether I ought to say fortunately. He wouldn’t.’

She had destroyed the two notes unopened. He had been at least half-lucid when she talked to him in his hospital room. He had asked, several times, to see me, without Margaret. So Helen had been obliged to give the message.

‘I wish’, I said, ‘that he had asked for her. She minds a great deal.’

‘That’s why he’d rather have you, maybe,’ said Helen.

The midday roads were dense with cars, and it took forty minutes before the taxi reached the clinic. On the way, I had been wondering what I should find, or even more what I should manage, to say. I was fond of Austin Davidson, and I respected that bright, uncluttered mind. But it wasn’t the respect that one might feel for an eminent old man. It was an effort to think of him as my father-in-law. Except when the sheer impact of his illness weighed one down, he seemed much more like a younger friend.

It was the clinic in which, during the war, I had first met Margaret. I thought I remembered, I might be imagining it, the number of my room. At any rate, it was on the same ground floor, at the same side, as the one I was entering now.

In his high bed, flanked by flowers on the tables close by – the ceiling shimmered with subaqueous green reflected from the garden – Austin Davidson looked grotesque. His head, borne up by three pillows, was wrapped in a bandage which covered his right eye and most of his forehead: even at that, there was a bruise under the right cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth was swollen. More than anything, he gave the appearance of having just been patched up after a fight. Among the bandages, one sepia eye stared at me. I heard his voice, dulled but the words quite clear.

‘You see God’s own fool.’

I felt certain that he had prepared that opening, determined to get it out.

‘Never mind.’

‘If one’s got to the point’ – he was speaking very slowly, with pauses for breath and also to hold his train of thought – ‘of doing oneself in – the least one can do – is to make a go of it.’

‘Lots of people don’t make a go of it, you know.’ To my own astonishment, at least in retrospect, for it was quite spontaneous, I found myself teasing him: dropping into a kind of irony, as he did so often, putting himself at a distance from the present moment. The visible side of Davidson’s face showed something like the vestige of a grin, as I reminded him of German officers during the war. Beck took two shots at himself, and then had to get someone to finish him off. Poor old Stülpnagel had blinded himself, but without the desired result. ‘You would expect them to be better at it than you, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t.’

‘Too much fuss. Not enough to show for it.’

He was drowsy, but he did not seem miserable. To an extent, he had always liked an audience. And also, was there even now a stirring of, yes, relief? Had he wanted to persist – it didn’t matter how much he denied it?

‘Tell them. No more visitors today. Margaret can come tomorrow. If she wants.’

‘Of course she will.’ Margaret was his favourite daughter; but he had never appeared to realise that his detachment could cause her pain.

‘She’s prudish about suicide.’ His voice became louder and much more clear. ‘I simply can’t understand her.’

After a moment:

‘Extraordinary thing to be prudish about.’

Then he began to ramble, or the words thickened so that it was hard to follow him. Sources of supply. That might mean the way he got hold of his drugs. Some people wouldn’t act as sources of supply. Prudish. Glad to say, others weren’t like Margaret–

It might have been strange to hear him, even in confusion, engaged in a kind of argument, scoring a dialectical triumph over Margaret. But it didn’t seem so. I was easier with him than she was: easier with him than with my own father, at least on the plane where Davidson and I were able to talk. Not that Davidson managed to be any cooler than my father. In fact, in his simple fashion, without trying, he had been as self-sufficient and as stoical as Davidson would have liked to be.

There had been nothing histrionic about my father’s death, which had happened a few months before. None of us had been present. He was in his late eighties, but he hadn’t thought to inform us that he was failing. On the last evening, in his own small room, he had asked his lodger, who was almost a stranger, to sit with him. ‘I think I am going to die tonight,’ so the lodger had reported him saying. He was right. It wasn’t given to Austin Davidson to die as quietly as that.

Even in stupor Davidson kept making gallant attempts to carry on the argument. Then I thought he had fallen asleep.

Out of semi-consciousness he made another effort.

‘I’m always glad to see you, Eliot.’

It sounded like a regression to the time when he first met me, before I married Margaret, when he was going about in his vigorous offhand prime. But, as I went away, I wondered if it hadn’t been a further regression, back to the pride, arrogance and brightness of his youth, when he and his friends felt themselves the lucky of this world, but, with manners different from ours, did not think of calling each other by their Christian names.

3: A Theme Restated

THE next time I saw him was on the Wednesday, since Margaret and I decided to share the visits, each going on alternate days. It was a tauntingly mellow September afternoon, like those on which one looked out of classroom windows at the start of a new school year.

Half-sitting in his bed, pillows propping him (that was to be his standard condition, to reduce the strain on his heart), Austin Davidson had been spruced up, though underneath the neat diagonal bandage across his eye there loomed another deep purple bruise which on Monday had been obscured. His hair, thick and silver grey, had been trimmed, the quiff respectfully preserved. Someone had shaved him, and he smelt fresh. He was wide awake, greeting me with a monocular, sharp, almost impatient gaze.

‘I should like some intelligent conversation,’ he said.

To understand that, one needed to have learned his private language. Since he first became ill, he seemed to have lost interest in, or at least be unwilling to talk about, the connoisseurship which had been the passion of his life. He wouldn’t read his own art criticism or anyone else’s. He chose not to look at pictures, not even his own collection, as though, now the physical springs of his existence had failed him, so his senses, including the sense that meant most to him, were no use any more.

Instead, he fell back on his last resource, which was something like a game. But it was a peculiar sort of game, to some of his acquaintances unsuitable, or even fatuous, for a ‘pure soul’ like Davidson. For it consisted of taking an obsessive day-by-day interest in the Stock Exchange. In fact, it was an interest that had given him pleasure all his life. Like all his circle, he had heard Keynes, with his usual impregnable confidence, telling them that, given half-an-hour’s concentrated attention to the market each morning, no man of modest intelligence could avoid making money. Unlike others of his circle, Davidson believed what he was told. Certainly he was a pure soul, but he enjoyed using his wits, and playing any kind of mental game. This also turned out to be a singularly lucrative one. He had been left a few thousand pounds before the First World War. No one knew how much he was worth in his old age; on that he was reticent, quite uncharacteristically so, as about nothing else in his life. He had made over sizeable blocks of investments to his daughters, but he had never given me the most oblique indication of how much he kept for himself.

So ‘intelligent conversation’ meant, in that bedroom at the clinic, an exchange about the day’s quotations. He became almost high-spirited, no, something more like playful. It was a reminder of his best years, when he seemed so much less burdened than the rest of us.

Listening to him, I had to discipline myself to take my part. In any circumstances, let alone these, I didn’t serve as an adequate foil. I could act as a kind of secretary, telephoning his stockbroker from the bedroom, so that Davidson could overhear. He wasn’t satisfied with academic discussions: that would have been like playing bridge for counters. But I discovered that his gambles were modest, not more than £500 at a time.

Apart from my secretarial duties, I wasn’t a good partner. I didn’t know enough. I assumed that, until he died, I should have to try to memorise the financial papers more devotedly than I had ever thought of doing.

Though he spun it out, and I followed as well as I could, that day’s effort dwindled away. Pauses. Then a long silence. His eye had ceased to look at me, as though he were turning inward.

After the silence, his voice came back: ‘I shan’t get out of here. Of course.’

He wasn’t asking for false hope. He made it impossible to give.

I asked: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course.’

Another pause.

‘They won’t let me. People always interfere with you.’ He was speaking without inflection or expression.

‘The one thing they can’t interfere with is your death. Not in the long run. You have to die on your own. That’s all there is to it, you know.’

He added: ‘I told Margaret that.’

Yes, he had told her. But he wasn’t aware of – and wouldn’t have been concerned with – her response, to which I had listened as we lay awake in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the cool, such as Davidson, who felt most passionately about death. Margaret, whose appetite for living was so strong, had to pay a corresponding price. She wouldn’t have talked, as more protected people might, of any of those figures which, by pretending to face the truth, in fact make it easier to bear. The swallow coming out of darkness into the lighted hall, and then out into the darkness again. That was too pretty for her. So were all the phrases about silence and the dark. Whatever they tried to say, was too near to say like that.

She struggled against it, even while she was searching for the C major of this life. The C major? In sexual love? In the love of children? She knew, as a cool and innocent man like Davidson never could have done, that you could hear the sound and still not have dismissed the final intimation. And, by a curious irony, having a father like Davidson had made that intimation sharper: made it sharper now.

That was why, lying awake in the night repeating to me his acerb remarks about his fiasco, she wasn’t reconciled. She was torn with tenderness, painful tenderness, mixed up with what was nothing else but anger. It was a combination which she sometimes showed towards her own children, when they might be doing themselves harm. Now she couldn’t prevent it breaking out, after her father tried to commit suicide, and then talked to her as though it had been an interesting event.

In the dark, she kept asking what she could do for him, knowing that there was nothing. At moments she was furious. With all the grip of her imagination, she was re-enacting and rewitnessing the scene of Sunday evening. The capsules marshalled on Davidson’s desk (he was a pernicketily tidy man): the swallows of whisky: the last drink, as though it was a modest celebration or perhaps one for the road. It might have been a harmless domestic spectacle. Capsules such as we saw every day. An old man taking a drink. But, just as in the trial I had had to attend earlier that year, objects could lose their innocence. For Margaret the capsules and the whisky glass weren’t neutral bits of matter any more.

They were reminders, they were more than that, they were emblems. Emblems of what? Perhaps, I thought, as I tried to soothe her, of what the non-religious never understand in the religious. Margaret, though she didn’t believe, was by temperament religious. Which meant, not as a paradox but as a condition, that she clung – more strongly than her father could have conceived possible – to the senses’ life, the species’ life. So, when that was thrown away or disregarded, she felt horror: it might be superstitious, she couldn’t justify it, but that was what those emblems stood for.

Her father, however, settled her in his own mind by saying again, as though that were the perfect formulation, that she was prudish about suicide. After a time during which neither he nor I spoke, and he was looking inward, he said, quite brightly: ‘Most of you are prudish about death. You’re prudish about death.’

He meant Margaret’s friends and mine, the people whom, before his illness, he used to meet at our house. They were a different generation from his, most of them younger than I was (within a month I should be fifty-nine).

‘You’re much more prudish than we were on that fairly relevant subject. Of course you’re much less prudish about sex. It’s a curious thought, but I suspect that when people give up being prudish about sex they become remarkably so about everything else.’ (I had heard this before: in his lively days, he used to say that our friends dared not talk about money, ambition, aspiration, or even ordinary emotion.) ‘Certainly about death. You people try to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been able to bear the nineteenth century’ – the old Bloomsbury hatred darted punctually out – ‘but at least they weren’t afraid to talk about death.’

‘It’s the only thing in one’s whole life that is a hundred per cent certain.’

‘It’s the only thing one is bound to do by oneself.’

Later, after he had died – which didn’t happen for over a year – I was not sure whether he had really produced those two sayings that afternoon. The difficulty was, I had so many conversations with him in the clinic bedroom; they were repetitive by their nature, and because Davidson was such a concentrated man. Talk about the Stock Exchange: then his thoughts about dying and death. That was the pattern which did not vary for weeks to come, and so the days might have become conflated in my memory. It often seemed to me that the other themes of his life had been dismissed by now, and there was only one, the last one, which he wanted to restate. You have to die on your own. And yet, he had never said that. I was inventing words for him. Perhaps I was inventing a theme that was, not his, but mine.

I hadn’t felt intimations of my death as deeply as Margaret. But, like all of us, intermittently since I was a young man, as often as a young man as when I was ageing, I had imagined it. What would it be like? There were the words we had all read or uttered. You die alone. On mourra seul. The solitude. I thought I could imagine it and know it, as one does being frightened, appalled or desirous.

There it was. It wasn’t to be evaded. Perhaps that was why I invented words for Davidson which he didn’t utter. And read into him feelings which I couldn’t be certain that he knew.

But certainly he said one thing, and did another, which I was able to fix precisely onto that afternoon.

‘Nearly all my friends are dead by now,’ he said. ‘Most of them had moderately unpleasant deaths.’

I was thinking, of those who had mattered to me, Sheila and Roy Calvert had died, though not naturally. Many of my acquaintances were reaching the age band where the statistics began to raise their voice. Looking at us all, one couldn’t prophesy about any single casualty, but that some of us would die one way or the other – within ten, fifteen years – one could predict with the certainty of a statistician. Only a fortnight before, while Margaret and I were still abroad, I had heard that Denis Geary, that robust schoolfellow of mine who had been a support to us a few months before, had gone out for a walk and been found dead.

‘Of course,’ said Davidson, ‘there’s only been one myth that’s ever really counted. I mean, the afterlife.’

‘It’s a pity one can’t believe in it,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ (Not then, but afterwards, I remembered kneeling by Sheila’s bed after her funeral, half-crazed for some sign of her, not even a word, just the shadow of a ghost.)

‘It’s a pity it’s meaningless. I don’t know why, but one doesn’t exactly approve of being annihilated. Though when it’s happened, nothing could matter less.’

One wouldn’t ask for much, Davidson was saying, just the chance to linger round, unobserved, and watch what was going on. It was a pity to miss all that was going to happen.

That was one of the few signs of sentimentality I had seen him show. Soon he was remarking sternly, as though reproving me for a relapse into weakness, that it was not respectable to talk about an afterlife. There wasn’t any meaning in it: there couldn’t be. It was the supreme wish-fulfilment. ‘Which, by the way,’ he said, brightening up, ‘has done the wretched human race a great deal more harm than good.’ He went on, still half-reproving me, telling me to think of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the name of the afterlife. Torturing bodies to save souls. Slaughter to get one’s place in heaven. ‘If people would only accept that this is the only life there is, they might be a shade more civilised.’

No, I didn’t want to argue: he was getting some sort of comfort from his old certainties. It seemed a perverse comfort. Yet he still believed in the enlightenment he grew up in, the lucky oasis, the civilised voices, the privileged Edwardian hopes.

Then he did something which also might have seemed perverse, if he had preserved the consistency of which he was so proud. It was a warm afternoon, and he was covered only by a single sheet. Suddenly, but not jerkily, he pulled it aside, and with eyes glossy-brown as a bird’s, oblivious of me, gazed down towards his feet. Against blue pyjama trousers, his skin shone pale, clear, not hairy: the feet were large, after the thin legs, with elongated, heavy-jointed toes. For some time I could not tell what he was studying so observantly. Then I noticed, over the left ankle, a small roll of swelling, so that the concavity between ankle-bone and talus had been filled in. On the right foot, the swelling might have been grosser; from where I sat, it was difficult to make out.

Davidson went on gazing, as intently, as professionally, as he used to look at pictures.

‘The oedema’s a shade less than this morning. Quite a bit less than yesterday,’ he said. He said it with a satisfaction that he couldn’t conceal, or didn’t think of concealing. Throughout his illness, for years past, he must have been studying his ankles, observing one of the clinical signs. Even now, night and morning (perhaps more often when he was alone) he went through the same routine. But it wasn’t routine to him. Sunday night – he had swallowed the capsules. All he said to me since, he meant. Nevertheless, when he inspected his ankles and decided the swelling was a fraction reduced, he felt a surge of pleasure, not at all ironic. No more ironic than if he had been in middle age and robust health, and had noticed a symptom which worried him but which, as he tested it, began to clear away.

4: Domestic Evening, Without Incident

VISITING her father every other day, Margaret’s behaviour, like his, began to show a contradiction which really wasn’t one. She couldn’t help becoming preoccupied with a future birth, with the child my nephew’s wife was expecting in four months’ time. Margaret had not previously given any sign of special interest in Muriel, and so far as she had a special interest in Pat it was negative, or at least ambivalent. Sometimes she found him good company, but when he had gone away she thought him worthless. And yet Margaret took to visiting them in their flat, and then invited them to dinner at our own, together with Muriel’s mother and stepfather.

That was a surprise in itself, a surprise, that is, that Azik Schiff should come. He was himself inordinately hospitable and in his own expansive fashion seemed to like us all. But he was also very rich: and, like other rich men, did not welcome hospitality unless he was providing it himself. However, he had accepted, and as we waited for them all I was saying to Margaret that one of the advantages of being rich was that everyone tended to entertain you according to your own standards. Just as all gourmets were treated as though the rest of us were gourmets. It seemed like a natural law, a curiously unjust one. Certainly the food and drink which had been set up for that night we shouldn’t have produced for anyone less sumptuous than Azik.

The young couple arrived a few minutes before the other two, but as soon as Azik entered the drawing-room he took charge. None of us had dressed, but he was wearing, as though in competition with Lester Ince, a cherry-coloured smoking jacket. He gave Margaret not a peck but a whacking kiss, and then stood on massive legs evaluating the room, in which he had never been before. In fact, he was more cultivated than any of us: the pictures he understood and approved of: but he was puzzled that, apart from the pictures, the furniture was so ramshackle. He had guessed our financial position – that was one of his gifts – and knew it as well as I did. Why did we live so modestly? He didn’t ask that question, but he did enquire about the flat. Yes, we had a lot of rooms, having joined two flats together. How much did we pay? I told him. He whistled. It was cheaper than he could have reckoned. He couldn’t help admiring a bargain: and yet, as he proceeded to explain, living like that was good tactics, but bad strategy.

‘You should buy a house, my friends,’ he said paternally (he was several years younger than I was) as at last he settled down on the sofa, his chest expanded, looking like a benevolent, ugly and highly intelligent frog.

Rosalind, his wife, braceleted, necklaced, bejewelled with each anniversary’s present, was looking at me with something like an apprehensive wink. She had known me when she was Roy Calvert’s mistress and later his wife: that was years before Margaret and I first met. Rosalind had known me when I was cagey and secretive, and it was a continual surprise to her that I didn’t mind, or even encouraged, Azik to interfere in my affairs. She was always ready to help me evade his questions, even after all the times when she had seen him and me get on so easily.

No, I said to Azik, if one has been born without a penny, one never learned to spend money. Azik shook his great head. ‘No, Lewis,’ he said, ‘there I must take issue with you. That excuse is not satisfactory. It doesn’t do credit to your intellect. First, I have to remind you that your lady bride’ (he beamed at Margaret: Azik spoke a good many languages imperfectly, and one of those was American business-English) ‘was not born without a penny. So there should be a corrective influence in this family. Second, I have to remind you that I also was born without a penny. I have to say that I have never found it difficult to spend money.’ With which Azik expounded on a ‘certain little difference’ between the tailor’s shop near the old Alexanderplatz where he was born, and his present home in Eaton Square.

Someone said (when Azik was projecting himself, he filled the room, and it wasn’t easy to notice who else was trying to edge in) was it true, the old story, that if one had been born rich and then had everything taken away one never minded much?

Azik pronounced that he had known some who suffered. People were almost infinitely resilient, I was beginning, but Azik went on with a shout: ‘You and I, Lewis, say we’ve lost everything tomorrow morning. You aren’t allowed to publish a word. These children don’t believe it, but we should make do. You’d pretend that nothing had happened and go and get a job as a clerk. As for me’ – he put a finger to the side of his nose – ‘I should make a few shillings on the side.’

He was benevolent and happy, parodying himself, showing off to Rosalind, whom he adored. None of us had such a flow of spirits, nor was so harmoniously himself. There might have been one single discontinuity, only one, and even that I could have exaggerated or imagined.

It happened when Margaret asked about the second drinks. On the first round she and I had had our usual long whiskies, and so had Pat: Azik had had a small one. He refused another, and watched our glasses being filled again.

Suddenly, quite unprovoked, he said: ‘No Jew drinks as you people do.’

‘Oh, come off it, Azik,’ I said. I mentioned something about parties in New York–

‘They are not real Jews. They are losing themselves.’

Real Jews, Azik went on, took sex easy, took wine easy: they didn’t go wild, as ‘you people’ do. I had never heard anything like that from him before. He might be overpowering, but he didn’t attack. We all knew that he kept up his Judaism; he went, not to a reformed synagogue, but to a conservative one, even though he said that he had no theology. All of a sudden, just for that instant (or was I reading back to my first Jewish friends?) Judaism seemed the least natural, or the least comfortable thing about him – as though it were a proud hurt, an affront to others.

He relaxed into paternal, prepotent supervision.

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘enjoy yourselves.’

He was the only one to enquire about young Charles. Last heard of in Persia, I said, on his way to Pakistan. We had heard nothing for a fortnight.

‘You must be worried, Lewis,’ he said, with a rush of fellow feeling.

I said, ‘a little’: the dinner party had distracted me, until then.

‘Oh, he’ll be all right. He lands on his feet,’ said Pat.

‘That you should not say.’ Azik turned sternly onto Pat, who for once looked outfaced, sulky, quite aware that he had shown jealousy of his cousin, glancing at his young wife, whose face was reposeful, as though she had not noticed anything at all nor heard of Charles.

As we sat at the dinner table, I was paying attention to Rosalind. Beautifully accoutred as she was, she had nevertheless let her hair go grey: that must have been a deliberate choice. She knew what was required of the elegant wife, no longer young, of a great tycoon. Her thin, freckled hands displayed her rings. As before, she sometimes gave me a look – sidelong from her cameo face – as though we shared an esoteric private joke. But all she talked about was Azik’s business, and how next week she would have to entertain the Prime Minister of Brazil. ‘It’s all in the game, you know,’ she said, with a dying fall which sounded sad and which was nothing of the kind. I sometimes wondered whether she ever thought that, if it had not been for fatality, she would still be married to a distinguished, perhaps an unbalanced, scholar (it was hard to imagine what Roy Calvert would have become in his fifties). Probably she didn’t. Rosalind lived on this earth. She might sigh over memories, but she would sigh contentedly and get on with the day’s work, which was to keep Azik cheerful and well.

On my left, her daughter Muriel was quiet, cheekbones and jawline softened by pregnancy. Then I caught a flash of her eyes, as though she were surreptitiously making fun of Rosalind or me or both. It was the kind of green-eyed disrespectful flash I had seen often enough in her father, whom she had never known. She was polite to me as she was to everyone, maddeningly polite, but I didn’t begin to understand her. She had not once asked me a question about her father, though she must have known that I had been his closest friend. One day, out of curiosity or provocation, I had tried to talk about him. ‘Did you think that?’ she had said decorously. ‘Oh, I must ask Aunt Meg’ (as she called Margaret, of whom she seemed to be fond). Again, she must have known that Margaret and Roy had never met.

When, for an instant, Pat engaged his mother-in-law in conversation, Muriel asked a few soft-voiced questions about the autumn theatres. She knew that I wasn’t much interested, and rarely went. Was she being obtuse, or amusing herself? She was abnormally self-possessed and strong-willed, that was all I knew about her. Like a good many other men, I found her – in some inexplicable and irritating fashion – very attractive.

Just then – we had finished the fish, Azik was smelling his first glass of claret, for which, in spite of his earlier strictures, he had considerable enthusiasm – I heard Pat utter the name of Margaret’s father. Startled, turning away from Muriel, I looked down the table. Pat was smiling at Margaret with something between protectiveness and triumph. His brown eyes were shining: he had his air of doggy confidence, of one who managed to please but wasn’t easily put down.

‘Yes,’ he was telling her, ‘he was in better spirits, I’m sure he was.’

‘You mean, you’ve seen him?’

‘Of course I have, Aunt Meg.’

It became clear that Pat was telling the truth, which could not invariably be assumed. It also became clear that Austin Davidson had talked with his innocent candour, and that Pat knew everything we knew, and had – certainly to his wife and her mother – passed most of it on. Pat had paid, not one visit, but several: for an instant Margaret looked stupefied, astonished that her father had told us nothing of this. But why should he? He had other visitors besides ourselves, but he didn’t think it relevant to mention them.

The greater mystery was how Pat had learned that Davidson was in the clinic at all, and how he had got inside the place himself. As for the first, he was one of those natural detectives or intelligence agents, whom I had come across, and been disconcerted by, more than once in my life: and, further, he had always been specially inquisitive about Davidson, and anxious to know him. Not from motives which were entirely pure: Pat was an aspiring painter, and he believed that an eminent art critic, even though retired, must have retained some useful acquaintances. Anyway, insatiably curious and also on the make, Pat had somehow obtained the entrée to Davidson’s bedroom, quite possibly using my name without undue fastidiousness.

Once there, it was no mystery at all that Davidson had encouraged him to come again. Pat was on the make, he was a busybody, a gossip, often a mischief-maker and several kinds of a liar: but he was also kind. In the presence of the isolated old man, Pat would try to enliven him, using all his resources, which were considerable: for he was more than kind, to many people he was a life-giver. The unfairness was, he had that talent far more highly developed than persons of better character: when I came to think of it, life-givers of Pat’s species had, so far as I had met them, usually been people who wouldn’t pass much of an examination into their moral nature. That had been true of my boyhood friend Jack Cotery, whom in a good many ways Pat resembled. It was probable, I thought, that Pat’s visits were more of a help to Austin Davidson than either Margaret’s or mine.

‘You must believe me,’ Pat said to Margaret, ‘he’s looking forward to things now, he’s picking up, you’ll see.’

‘I’ve known him longer than you have, haven’t I?’ said Margaret.

‘That’s why you don’t see everything about him now,’ Pat replied, with his mixture of tenderness and cheek. No, he insisted, you have to notice that Davidson was eager for his little pleasures: he was allowed five cigarettes a day, and each one was an occasion; so were his cups of tea. He had made his own timetable to live by. He would go on living for a long time yet.

He had put that ‘other business’ behind him, Pat was persuading her. It had been an incident, that was all. Margaret did not believe him, and yet wanted to. In spite of herself she was feeling grateful. Pat had heard all about Davidson’s plan to kill himself. And yet he could forget it, from one minute to the next: it wasn’t that he was too young to understand, for often the young understood suicide better than the rest of us. Perhaps he was just too surgent. Anyway, his optimism came from every cell of his body. He was positive that Austin Davidson would survive and that his life was worth living.

Azik, left out of this conversation, was giving his wife uncomfortable glances. Not that he hadn’t listened to it all before; not that he was embarrassed for Margaret, or found his son-in-law unduly brash; more, I thought, because Azik had the delicacy of the very healthy, who did not much relish the echoes of mortality. Finally he said to Margaret that he would send her father more flowers, and addressed me down the table on the subject of next week’s general election. Yes, it would be a near thing. The American election wouldn’t be. Things looked a bit more promising all round, said Azik: for about that time, a year or two before and after, he, like other detached and unillusioned men, was letting himself indulge in a patch of hope. That was the case with Francis Getliffe and with me: with Eastern European and American friends, including even David Rubin, the least optimistic of men. In world-outlook, there was more hope about than at any time since the twenties. We did not enjoy being reminded of that afterwards, but it was so.

About our local affairs, Azik was repeating what he often told us: it didn’t much matter who got in. He proceeded to lecture us, with the relish of a born pedagogue, on the limits of political freewill. Margaret was grinning surreptitiously in my direction: she enjoyed hearing me being treated as an innocent. Like me, she was fond of Azik, and his ingrained conviction that we were ignorant, though not entirely unteachable, was one of the endearing things about him. But she couldn’t resist asking him if he wasn’t being disingenuous. After all, it was common knowledge that he had made lavish contributions to Labour Party funds.

Azik was imperturbable. ‘That doesn’t affect the issue, my friends,’ he said. ‘That is a little piece of insurance, you understand?’

Did we? Azik liked playing the game all ways. He was a shrewd operator. If a Labour government came to power, there were advantages in having friends at court. Yet that, I thought, was altogether too simple. Azik wished to pretend to us, and to himself, that he calculated all the time: but he didn’t, any more than less ingenious men. He was an outsider, and he was, in some residual fashion, of which he was half-ashamed, on the side of other outsiders. For all his expansiveness, the luxury in which he revelled, he was never ultimately at ease with his fellow tycoons. He had once told me that, coming to England as an exile, he had felt one irremovable strain: you had to think consciously about actions which, in your own country, you performed as instinctively as breathing. He was also another kind of exile: rich as he had become, he had to think consciously about his actions when he was in the company of other rich men.

It sometimes occurred to me – not specially at that dinner table – how differently he behaved from the Marches, who had been the first rich family to befriend me when I was young. They too were Jewish: they were not, and never had been, anything like so plutocratic as Azik had become. And yet, though they were slightly more sceptical about politics than their Gentile counterparts, their instincts were the same. After generations in England, they thought and spoke like members of the English haute bourgeoisie, like distinctly grander and better-connected Forsytes. If, when I first knew them, anyone had made contributions such as Azik’s to the wrong party, some of the older members might have been capable of saying (though I didn’t remember hearing the phrase in the March houses) that he was a traitor to his class.

Nevertheless, after dinner, Azik did recall to me one of those patriarchs, my favourite one. We were sitting in the drawing-room, brandy going round. It was quite early, not long after ten, but Pat had begun to fuss ostentatiously over his wife. Twice he asked her, wasn’t it time for him to take her home? Coolly, demurely, she said that she was perfectly well.

‘Of course she is,’ said Margaret. ‘This isn’t an illness, don’t you realise that?’

‘If it is,’ said Rosalind, ‘it’s a very pleasant one.’

There was an unexpected freemasonry. Margaret and Rosalind agreed that, when they were carrying their children, they had never felt better in their lives. They also agreed that they wished they could have had some more. Azik gave them a condescending hyper-masculine smile, as though women were women, as though (he must have known when he listened to his wife’s confidences, that she and Margaret had less in common even than he and I, and liked each other a great deal less) he wasn’t above remarking that they were sisters under the skin.

‘That’s all very well,’ he projected himself again. ‘But I say young Pat’s right. He’s got to be careful.’ He gave his wife a beaming glance. ‘You don’t have your first grandchild every day. He’s got to be careful. As far as that goes, I must say, I’m not happy that they’re being careful enough. I don’t like the sound of that doctor of theirs. They ought to have the best man in London–’

Azik had been studying the Medical Directory, in search of their doctor’s qualifications, and was deeply suspicious as a result. It was then that I had a memory of old Mr March, Charles March’s father, the patriarch whom we used to know as Mr L, going through the same drill. When his daughter was expecting a baby, or his relatives were ill, or even their friends, Mr March would carry out sombre researches into doctors’ careers, and emerge, with indignation, prophecies of disaster and fugues of total recall, expressing his disapprobation and contempt for what he called practitioners, and above all for the particular practitioner in charge of the case.

Even Azik couldn’t let himself go in his freedom so totally as Mr L. Yet for an instant the images got superposed, the two of them, abundant, paternal, unrestrained, acting as they felt disposed to act.

With a good grace, Muriel got ready to go. Her step was still elegant and upright: as she said goodbye, she gave Margaret a smile which was secretive, lively, amused. Gallantly, like someone who would be glad to execute an imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh but hadn’t the excuse, Pat draped a cape over her shoulders.

When they had left and we heard Pat drive the car off down below, Azik had a word to say about their living arrangements, the Chelsea flat, paid for out of Muriel’s money, for she kept them both. For once Azik had no immediate suggestions for improvement. Then, having disposed of the topic of his stepdaughter, he introduced another one, like a child saving the jam to the last, that of his own son. This was the only child Azik and Rosalind had between them, born when she was over forty. One never met Azik without, in the end, the conversation coming round to David, who had already been the subterranean cause of Azik’s sympathy about Charles. And, in fact, the conversation, at least with Margaret and me, tended to repeat itself, as it did that night. David was high-spirited and very clever. He was at a private day school in London: Azik wanted him to go later to a smart boarding school. If so, we kept telling him, he ought to be at a boarding school now. It would be harder for him, much harder, to leave home at thirteen or fourteen. ‘No,’ said Azik, as he had done before, ‘that I could not do. I could not lose him now.’

It was the old argument, but Azik enjoyed any argument about his son. It even kept him up later than he intended. David. The possibilities with David. David’s education. Azik went over it all again, before his gaze at his wife began to become more intense, more uxorious, and he felt impelled towards his power base, his home.

5: Red Carpets

THE chamber of the House of Lords glowed and shone under the chandeliers, the throne-screens picked out in gold, the benches gleaming red, nothing bare nor economical wherever one turned the eye, as though the Victorian Gothic decorators had been told not to be inhibited or as though someone with the temperament of Azik Schiff had been given a free hand to renovate the high altar of St Mark’s.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, about half past five, the benches not half-full, but, as peers drifted in from tea, not so startlingly empty now as they had been an hour before. I had come to hear Francis Getliffe make a speech, and he had found me a seat just behind the Bar, at ground level. I had heard him speak there several times, but that afternoon there was a difference. This time, as he got up from the back benches, he was on the right hand of the throne, not the left. The election, as we had guessed at the dinner party with the Schiffs, a month before, had been as tight as an election could be: but it had been decided, and a Labour government had come to power. So, for the first time, Francis was speaking from the government side.

He had never been a good speaker, and he was using what looked like a written text. He wasn’t a good reader. But he was being listened to. The debate was on defence policy, and it was well known that he was a grey eminence: no, not so grey, for his views had been published, in his time he had gained negative popularity because of them. Ever since he was a young man, in fact, he had been an adviser to Labour politicians. As he grew older, no one had more private influence with them on scientific-military affairs. That was when they were in opposition, but now he was being attended to as though this were an official statement.

As a matter of fact, it was as guarded as though it might have been. Francis was both loyal and punctilious, and, though he had to speak that afternoon, he wasn’t going to embarrass his old colleagues. One had to know the language, the technical detail, and much back history, to interpret what he was, under the courtesies, pressing on them. Under the courtesies – for Francis, whose politeness had always been stylised, had taken with gusto to the singular stylisation of that chamber. In his speech he was passing stately compliments across the floor to ‘the noble Lord, Lord Ampleforth’. One needed a little inside information to realise that Lord Ampleforth, who was something like Francis’ opposite number on the Tory side, was a man with whom Francis had not agreed on a single issue since the beginning of the war; or that Francis was now telling his own government that, in three separate fields, the exact opposite of Lord Ampleforth’s policies ought to be their first priority.

Polite hear-hears from both sides as Francis sat down. Lord Lufkin, sprawling on the cross-benches, looked indifferent, as though certain he could have done better himself. In the back tier of the opposition benches, I saw the face of Sammikins, hot-eyed, excited, but (since I last met him, twelve months before) startlingly thin.

The courtesies continued. Lord Ampleforth, who spoke next, paid compliments to the noble Lord, Lord Getliffe, ‘who brings to your Lordships’ house his great scientific authority and the many years of effort he has devoted to our thinking on defence’. Lord Ampleforth, who despite his grand title had started his career as a radio manufacturer called Jones, was a rougher customer than Francis and more of a natural politician: he drew some applause from his own side when he expressed ‘a measure of concern’ about Francis’ ‘well-known’ views upon the nuclear deterrent. Even so, one again needed a little inside information to grasp what he really felt about Francis. It helped perhaps to know that he had, during the time of the previous government, rigorously removed Francis from his last official committee. More courtesies. The noble Lord’s international reputation. The wisdom he brought to our counsels. Assurances of support in everything that contributed to the country’s security.

As soon as Lord Ampleforth finished, Francis got up from his place and nodded to me as he went out, so that I joined him in the lobby. He gave me a creased saturnine smile. As we walked over the red carpet down the warm corridor – so red, so warm that I felt rather like Jonah in one of his more claustrophobic experiences or alternatively as I had done after an optical operation, with pads over both eyes – Francis remarked: ‘That chap reminds me of a monkey. A very persistent monkey trying to climb a monkey-puzzle tree. That is, if they do.’

All I knew of monkey-puzzles was the sight of them in front of houses more prosperous than ours, in the streets where I was born. However, Francis was not occupied with scientific accuracy. Lord Ampleforth had climbed, he was saying, over all kinds of resistance: on the shoulders of and in spite of their efforts to throw him off, better men than himself. Including a number of the scientists we knew.

‘He’ll go on climbing,’ said Francis with cheerful acerbity. ‘Nothing will ever stop him. Not for long.’

Affable greetings along the corridors. Congratulations to Francis on his speech. Lord Ampleforth had an astonishing gift, Francis was saying, for ingratiating himself with his superiors, and an equally astonishing gift for doing the reverse with those below.

We entered the guest room. More mateyness, from men round the bar, more congratulations on the speech. I couldn’t help thinking that they might have found Francis’ present line of thought more stimulating. But he was popular there. As we sat in a window seat looking over the river, lights on the south bank aureoled in the November mist, people greeted him with the kind of euphoria that one met in other kinds of enclave, such as a college or a club.

One of the new ministers, from a table close by, was engaging Francis in earnest, low-voiced conversation. So, getting on with my first drink, I gazed from our corner into the room. It wasn’t altogether novel to me: when Francis was in London, I sometimes met him there: but my first visit had been much further back, in the thirties, when I had been invited by an acquaintance called Lord Boscastle. So far as I could trust my memory, it had been different then. Surely there had been less people, both in the chamber and round this room? Somewhat to his surprise, Lord Boscastle’s first speech for twenty years had not been much of a draw.

Had the place really been socially grander, or was that a young man’s impression? I remembered noticing, even in the thirties, that there were not many historic titles knocking about. Lord Boscastle, who bore one and was a superlative snob, had once remarked, with obscure and lugubrious satisfaction, that the House was quintessentially middle-class. Well, that night, there were still three or four historic titles on view. One of them was sitting at the bar, with a depressed stare, imbibing gin. There was another, at a table surrounded by his daughters: my maternal grandfather had been a gamekeeper on his grandfather’s estate. A number, though, had come up from the Commons, or their nineteenth-century ancestors had; some had been successes in politics, some had missed the high places, and some had never hoped for much. There were several life peers, as Francis was, and some women. Round the room one could hear a variety of accents: about as many as in the Athenaeum, which was a meritocratic club, and a good deal more than in the other club I sometimes used.

Most of these people might have seemed strange to their predecessors in the Lords a hundred years before. No doubt the professional politicians (and there had been plenty of professional politicians there in the nineteenth century, even if, like Palliser, they were landed magnates too) would have found plenty to talk about to the modern front-benchers: there was no tighter trade union in England, then or now. But still, it was like our college, Francis’ and mine. The fabric of the building hadn’t altered: the survival of politeness in which Francis had been indulging in the Chamber, that hadn’t altered either, not by a word. The forms remained the same, while the contents changed. It had perhaps been a strength sometimes, this national passion for clinging on to forms, nostalgic, pious, warthog obstinate. Alternatively, it could have released our energies if we had cut them away. And yet, for this country that had never been on, there had never been a realistic chance. Bend the forms, make them stretch, use them for purposes quite different from those in which they had grown up: that had been the way we found it natural (the pressures were so mild we didn’t feel them, as mild as the soft English weather) to work. Sometimes I wondered whether my son and his contemporaries would find it natural too.

I mentioned as much to Francis that night. I had recently heard from Charles, and so could think about him at ease. His was a generation that to Francis, whose children were older, seemed like strangers.

The loudspeaker boomed out – ‘Defence debate. Speaking, the Lord–’ Within two minutes of this news, the population flowing into the guest room had markedly increased. Among the deserters was Lord Ampleforth, pushing his way towards the bar, heavy shoulders hunched. Glancing across to our corner, he nodded to Francis, a flashing-eyed, recognitory nod, as from one power to another. Francis called out: ‘Interesting speech, Josh.’

We watched Josh acquire his whisky, and glance round the room.

‘Looking for someone useful,’ Francis quietly commented. Apparently, whatever Josh was in search of, he didn’t find it. He swallowed his drink at speed, gave another flashing-eyed nod to Francis, patted two men on their shoulders, and went out, presumably back to the Chamber, even though Lord – was still up.

Francis, settling back in his chair by the window, did not feel obliged to follow. He was comfortable, ready to sit out the next few speeches, until out of courtesy he returned for the end of the debate. If it hadn’t been for his own choice, he wouldn’t have been as free as that; he would have been on the front bench, waiting to wind up for the government. For, the weekend after the election, he had had an offer. Would he become a minister of state? To take charge of the nuclear negotiations? He had told me before he replied, but he wasn’t asking for advice. He had said no.

There was one objective reason. He knew, just as I knew, without the aid of Azik’s benevolent instruction, how little a minister could do. The limits of free action were cripplingly tight, tighter than seemed real to anyone who had not been inside this game. We had both watched, been associated with, and gone down alongside a Tory minister, Roger Quaife, who had tried to do what Francis would have had to try. And Quaife had been far more powerful than Francis could conceivably be. The limits of freedom for this government would be much less than for the last. Francis would fail, anyone would fail. He had done a good deal in the line of duty – but this, he said bleakly, was a hiding to nothing. If he had asked my opinion, I should have agreed.

But that wasn’t all. He had been an influence for so long. He had been criticised, at times in disfavour, privately defamed – but always, like other eminent scientists called in to give advice, covered by a kind of mantle of respect. That closed and secret politics was different from politics in the open. Francis hadn’t been brought up in open politics. At sixty-one (he was two years older than I was) his imagination and thin skin told him what it would be like. Francis had plenty of courage, but it was courage of the will.

But that was not all either, or even most of it. His major reason for saying no, almost without a thought, was much simpler. It was just that he had become very happy. This hadn’t always been so. His marriage – that had been good from the beginning. If he hadn’t been lucky there, if he hadn’t had the refuge of his wife and children, I had sometimes thought, he would have broken down. Even now, though his face looked younger than his age, his hair still dark, carefully trimmed on the forehead, by a streak of vanity, to conceal that he hadn’t much dome on the top of his fine El Greco features, he bore lines of strain and effort, bruiselike pouches left by old anxiety under his eyes. For many years his creative work hadn’t gone well enough, according to the standards he set himself. Then at last that had come right. In his fifties he became more serene than most men. To those who first met him at that time, it might have seemed that he was happy by nature. To me, who had known him since we were very young, it seemed like a gift of grace. His home in Cambridge, his laboratory, where, since he was a born father, the research students loved him as his children did, his own work – what could anyone want more? He just wished to continue in the flow of life. Yes, in the flow there were the concerns of anyone who felt at all: his friends’ troubles, illnesses, deaths, his children’s lives. His eldest son, more gifted than Francis himself, was eating his heart out for a woman who couldn’t love him; his favourite daughter, in America, was threatening a divorce. He took those concerns more deeply just because he felt so lucky and thus had energy to spare. That was the flow, all he wanted was for it to stretch ahead: he wasn’t going to break out of it now.

So he had refused. Some blamed him, thinking him overproud or even lacking in duty. The job had gone to an old wheel-horse of the party, who was given it for services rendered. ‘He won’t last long,’ said Francis that night, ruminating on politics after the departure of Josh. ‘There’s talk that they may want to rope you in. Well, you’ve always had to do the dirty work, haven’t you?’

He grinned. He had spoken quite lightly, and I didn’t pay much attention. I should have asked a question, but we were interrupted by acquaintances of Francis enquiring if they might join us, and bringing up their chairs. Two of them were new members on his own side, the other a bright youngish Tory. They were all eager to listen to him, I noticed. He was relaxed and willing to oblige. But what they listened to would have puzzled those who had known him only in his stiffer form, fair-minded and reticent in the college combination room.

For Francis was giving his opinions about the people who had worked on the atomic bomb. His opinions weren’t at all muffled, he wasn’t bending over backwards to be just: he had an eye for human frailty and it was sparkling now. ‘Anyone who thinks that Robert Oppenheimer was a liberal hero might as well think that I’m a pillar of the Christian faith.’

‘X (an Englishman) never had an idea in his head. That’s why he gave everyone so much confidence.’

‘Y (an American) is an anti-Semitic Jew who only tolerates other Jews because the Russians don’t.’

Some of Francis’ stories were new to me. Several of his characters I had met. I had thought before, and did so again that evening, that since he became content he had shown it differently from most other men. A good many, when they had been lucky, felt considerable warmth and approval for others who had been lucky too. Somehow it added to their own deserts. Well, Francis was not entirely above this feeling: but more and more he felt a kind of irreverence, or rather gave his natural irreverence, carefully concealed during his years of strain, its head. Buttoned up, stuffed, deliberately fair – so he had seemed to most people when he thought that he mightn’t justify himself. His wife Katherine knew him otherwise; so did his children; so did I, and one or two others. But with everyone else he was determined not to show envy, not even to let his tongue rip, at the expense of those who were enjoying what he so much longed for. Those who did better creative work than his had to be spoken about with exaggerated charity. It made him seem maddeningly judicious, or too good to be true. He wasn’t. As he became happy, he became at the same time more benign and more sardonic. I didn’t remember seeing that particular change in anyone else before.

He was talking about David Rubin. Yes, he was one of the best physicists alive, he was a better man than most of them. It wasn’t decent for anyone to be so clever. But the trouble with Rubin, Francis said, was that he enjoyed being proved right more than doing anything useful. He had never believed that any of us could do anything useful. If he knew that we were all going to blow ourselves up in three hours’ time, David would say that that had always been predictable and remind us that he had in fact predicted it.

I was enjoying myself, but I had to leave. As I retraced my way over the red carpets, I was hoping for a glimpse of Sammikins, just to ask how he was. I had an affection for him: he was a wild animal, brave but lost. He hadn’t come into the guest room for a drink, which was strange enough. I wanted to glance into the Chamber, to see if he was still sitting there, but an attendant reminded me that that wasn’t allowed, guests had to pass without lingering on to the red carpet on the other side.

6: Marriage, Elderly and Youthful

MARGARET had had her suspicions for some time, but they were not confirmed until the evening of Hector Rose’s dinner party. She and I had arranged to meet in a Pimlico pub, because she was coming on from Muriel Eliot’s flat and Rose (among the other unexpected features of his letter) had given an address in St George’s Drive. As soon as Margaret arrived, I didn’t need telling that she was distressed – no, not brooding, but active and angry. Her colour was high, her eyes brilliant, and when I said, ‘Something the matter,’ it was not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

She looked at me, seemed about to break out, then suddenly smiled.

‘No. Not yet. Not here.’

Her tone was intimate. We both understood, she didn’t want to spoil the next few minutes. It wasn’t just an accident that we were meeting in this pub. The place had memories for each of us, but not particularly pleasant ones, certainly not unshadowed ones. We used to drink there, early in the war, when I was living in Dolphin Square, close by: right at the beginning of our relation, long before we married, when we were already in love but in doubt whether we should come through. Sitting there now, more than twenty years later, or walking round the corner to the square, we felt as we had done before, the Dantesque emotion in reverse. No greater misery, he said, than to recall a happy time in sadness: turn that the other way round. At some points our sentimentalities were different, but here they were the same. The scenes of the choked and knotted past – if we had any reasonable pretext, as on that night, we went and looked at them with our present eyes.

Margaret had asked for bitter, which she rarely drank nowadays. The pub was humming with background music, in the corner lights on a pin-table flashed in and out, all new since our time. But then we had not noticed much, except ourselves.

She gazed round, and smiled again. She said: ‘Well, what’s it going to be like tonight?’

We hadn’t the vestige of an idea. The week before I had received a letter in a beautiful italic hand that once had been so familiar, when I used to read those minutes of Rose’s, lucid as the holograph itself. The letter read:

My dear Lewis, It is a long time since I said goodbye to you as a colleague, but I have kept in touch with your activities from a distance. When I read your work, I feel that I know you better than during our period together in the service: that gives me much regret. It is unlikely that you could have heard, but I have recently remarried. It would give us both much pleasure if you and your wife could spare us an evening to come to dinner. [There followed some dates to choose from.] I have retired from all public activities, and so you will be doing a kindness if you can manage to come.

Yours very sincerely,

Hector Rose

In the years when I had worked under Rose in Whitehall, and they were getting on for twenty, I had never met his wife. It was known that he lived right at the fringe of Highgate: when he entertained, which wasn’t often, he did so at the Athenaeum: there was no mention of children: he kept his private life locked up, as though it were a state secret. Underneath his polite, his blindingly polite manners, he was a forbidding man, in the sense that no one could come close. He was as tough-minded as any of the civil-service bosses, and I came to admire his sheer ability more, the longer I knew him. But that facade, those elaborate manners – they were so untiring, so self-invented, often so ridiculous, that one felt as though one were stripping off each onion-skin and being confronted by a precisely similar onion-skin underneath. There were those who thought he must be homosexual. I couldn’t have guessed. By this time he was sixty-six, and reading his letter Margaret and I decided that he must have married a second time for company (I remembered reading a bare notice of the death of the first wife, with the single piece of information that she, like Rose himself, had been the child of a clergyman). Otherwise, the only inference we could draw came from his last sentence. Rose used words carefully, as a master of impersonal draftsmanship, and that sounded remarkably like a plea. If so, it was the only plea I had ever known him make. He was the least comfortable of companions, but no one was freer from self-pity.

So, as Margaret and I walked, with our own perverse nostalgia, across the end of the square, past the church and the white scarred planes, along the street for a few hundred yards, we couldn’t imagine what we were going to. When we came outside the house itself, it was like the one that I had lived in towards the end of the war, under the eye and landladyship of the ineffable Mrs Beauchamp: a narrow four-storey building, period latish nineteenth century, ramshackle, five bells flanking the door with five name-cards beside them. Rose’s was the ground-floor flat: it couldn’t be more than three or four rooms, I was reckoning as I rang the bell. It was another oddity that Rose should live in this fashion. He had no private means, he might not have earned much since he retired from the Department, but his pension would be over £3000 a year. That didn’t spread far by this date, but it spread farther than this.

But, when he opened the door, all was momentarily unchanged. Strong, thick through the shoulders, upright: his preternatural youthfulness had vanished in his fifties, but he looked no older than when I saw him last.

‘My dear Lewis, this is extraordinarily good of you! How very kind of you to come! How very, very kind!’

He used to greet me like that when, as his second in command, I had been summoned to his office and had performed the remarkable athletic feat of walking the ten yards down the corridor.

He was bowing to Margaret, who had met him only two or three times before.

‘Lady Eliot! It’s far far too long since I had the pleasure of seeing you–’

His salutations, which now seemed likely to describe arabesques hitherto unheard of, had the knack of putting their recipient at a disadvantage, and Margaret was almost stuttering as she tried to reply.

Bowing, arms spread out, he showed us – the old word ushered would have suited the performance better – into the sitting-room, which led straight out of the communal hall. As I had calculated when we stood outside, they had only one main room, and the sitting-room was set for dinner, napery and glass upon the table, what looked like Waterford glass out of place in the dingy house. Round the walls were glass-fronted bookshelves, stacked with volumes a good many of which, I discovered later, were prizes from Marlborough and Oxford. A young lecturer or research student at one of the London colleges, just married, might have been living there. However, neither Margaret nor I could attend to the interior decoration, when we had the prospect of Rose’s wife herself.

‘Lady Eliot,’ said Rose, like a master of ceremonies, ‘may I present– Darling, may I introduce Sir Lewis Eliot, my former colleague, my distinguished colleague.’

As I muttered ‘Lady Rose’ and took her hand, I was ready for a lot of titular incantations, wishing that we had Russian patronymics or alternatively that Rose had taken to American manners, which seemed unlikely. It was going to be tiresome to call this woman Lady Rose all night. She was alluring. No, that wasn’t right, there was nothing contrived about her, she was simply, at first sight, attractive. Not beautiful: she had a wide mouth, full brown eyes, a cheerful uptilted nose. Her cheeks seemed to wear a faint but permanent flush. She must have been about forty, but she wouldn’t change much; at twenty she wouldn’t have looked very different, a big and sensuous girl. She was as tall as Rose, only two or three inches shorter than I was, not specially ethereal, no more so than a Renoir model.

Margaret gave me the slightest of marital grins, jeering at both of us. Our reconstructions of the situation…elderly people ‘joining forces’, marriage for company. If that was marrying for company, then most young people needed more of it. As for Rose’s putative plea, the only reason for reviving our acquaintance seemed to be that he wanted to show her off, which was simple and convincing enough.

In actual fact, as company in the conversational sense, she wasn’t a striking performer, as I discovered when we set out to talk. She was superficially shy, not at all shy deeper down. She was quite content to leave the talk to us, beaming placidly at Rose, as though signalling that she was pleased with him. I picked up one or two facts, such as that there had been another husband, though what had happened to him was not revealed. If there had been a divorce, it had been kept quiet. I couldn’t gather how she and Rose had ever met: she didn’t belong to any sort of professional world, she came perhaps – there was a residual accent – from origins like mine. I knew that when Rose left the service he had taken a couple of directorships: my guess was that he had come across her in one of those offices; she might have been his secretary.

Well, there they were, eyes meeting down the table. ‘Jane darling, would it be troubling you if you reached behind you–’ The one aspect which baffled me completely was why they should be living like students. It might have been one of the games of marriage, in which they were pretending to be young people starting out. If so, that must have been his game, for she would have been satisfied wherever they had lived.

She was an excellent cook. On nights when we had worked late together, Rose and I used to split a bottle of wine, and he had recollected that.

He was talking with elaborate animation to Margaret about the differences between Greats in his time at Oxford, and the philosophy in hers at Cambridge. Jane listened and basked. As for me, I was engaged in a simple reflection. A woman had once told me that she didn’t know, no one could possibly know, what a man was like until she had gone to bed with him. It was the kind of comment that sounded wise when one was young, and probably wasn’t. And yet, looking at that pair, remembering how so many people had pigeon-holed Rose, myself among them, I felt that this once there might be something in it.

Table pushed back after the meal, for the room was small though high-ceilinged, we sat round the grate, in front of an electric fire. Rose and his wife had finished drinking for the evening, but hospitably he had put a decanter of port on the floor. Some more fine glass, from the archidiaconal or even the Highgate home. I mentioned former colleagues. I tried to get him to say something about his career.

‘Oh, my dear Lewis, that’s really water under the bridge, water distinctly under the bridge, shouldn’t you agree? I don’t know whether Lady Eliot has ever had the misfortune to be exposed to the reminiscences of retired athletes,’ he was gazing, bleached-eyed, at Margaret, ‘but I assure you that mine would be, if anything, slightly duller.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Margaret, who still found him disconcerting.

‘But then, my dear Lady Eliot, if you’ll permit me, you haven’t spent getting on for forty years in government departments.’

‘Do you regret it?’ I said. I had learned long since that one had to tackle him head on.

‘Regret in what particular manner? I’m afraid I’m being obtuse, of course.’

‘Spending your life that way.’

Rose gave his practised, edged, committee smile. ‘I follow. I should be inclined to think that, with my attainments such as they are, I shouldn’t have been markedly more useful anywhere else. Or perhaps markedly less.’

‘That’s a bit much, Hector,’ I broke out. I said that, when I first reported to him and for years afterwards, he had been tipped to become head of the Civil Service. That hadn’t happened. He had finished as a senior permanent secretary, one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Whitehall, but not at the absolute top. Most of us thought he had been unlucky, and in fact badly dealt with. (I noticed that this seemed to be news to his wife, who had blushed with something like gratification.) Did he mind?

‘I doubt if it would have affected the fate of the nation, my dear Lewis. I think you will agree that the general level of our former colleagues was, judged by the low standard of the human race, distinctly high. That is, granted their terms of reference, which may, I need hardly say, be completely wrong, a good many of them were singularly competent. Far more competent than our political masters. I learned that when I was a very lowly assistant principal, just down from Oxford. And I’m afraid I never unlearned it. Incidentally, out of proportion more competent than the businessmen that it was my misfortune to have to do official business with. Of course my experience has been narrow, I haven’t had Lewis’ advantages, and my opinion is parti pris.’ He was speaking to Margaret. ‘So you must forgive me if I sound parochial. But, for what it is worth, that is my opinion. That is, the competition among my colleagues was relatively severe. So a man who by hook or by crook became a permanent secretary ought to feel that he hadn’t any right to grumble. He’s probably been more fortunate than he deserved. There was an old Treasury saying, Lewis will remember, that in the midst of a crowd of decent clever men anyone who became a permanent secretary had of necessity to be something of a shit.’

Rose delivered that apophthegm as blandly as his normal courtesies. His wife chortled, and Margaret grinned.

‘Well,’ said Rose, ‘I qualified to that extent.’

‘Hector,’ I said, ‘you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Haven’t I, my dear Lewis? I really do apologise. I am so very, very sorry.’

We gazed at each other. We were less constrained that night than we had been during the years in the office. And yet he was just as immovable, it was like arguing with him over a point on which I was, after all the paraphernalia, going inevitably to be overruled.

Rose was continuing, in his most unargumentative tone.

‘Recently I had the pleasure of introducing my wife to the Italian lakes. Actually we chose that for our honeymoon–’

‘Lovely,’ said Jane.

‘Yes, we thought it was a good choice. And, as a very minor bonus, I happened to come across an inscription which might interest you, Lewis. Perhaps, for those whose Latin has become rusty, I may take the liberty of translating. It is pleasantly simple. GAIUS AUFIDIUS RUFUS. HE WAS A GOOD CIVIL SERVANT.

‘Don’t you think that is remarkably adequate? Who could possibly want a more perfect epitaph than that?’

I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was parodying himself. I nodded my head, in acquiescent defeat. Impassively he let show a smile, but, unlike his committee smile, it contained a degree of both malice and warmth. Then he gave us, his wife for the first time assisting in the conversation, a travelogue about Como and Garda, the hotels they had stayed in, the restaurants they would revisit when, the following spring, they proposed to make the same trip again. This honeymoon travelogue went on for some time.

Then, when we got up and began our goodbyes, Rose encircled us with thanks for coming. At last we got out into the road, waiting for a taxi: the two of them, while they waved to us, stood on the doorstep close together, as though they were ready to be photographed.

As we drove past Victoria through the Belgravia streets, Margaret, in the dark and sheltering cab, was saying: ‘How old is she?’

‘Late thirties?’

‘Older. Perhaps she’s too old.’

‘Too old for what?’

‘A child, you goat.’ Her voice was full of cheerful sensual nature. ‘Anyway, we’d better watch the births column next year–’

She went on: ‘Good luck to them!’

I said yes.

She said: ‘I hope it goes on like that.’ She added: ‘And I hope something else doesn’t.’

We had both enjoyed the bizarre but comforting evening, and I had remembered only intermittently (and that perhaps had been true for her) that she had news to break. Now she was angry again – at me, at herself, at the original cause – for having to fracture the peace of the moment.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Your nephew.’

Muriel had told her the story that afternoon. Pat was having other women, certainly a couple since the marriage, with the baby due in the New Year. It was as matter-of-fact as that.

‘He’s a little rat,’ said Margaret.

With the lights of Park Lane sweeping across us, I remarked: ‘You can’t do anything.’

‘You mustn’t defend him.’

‘I wasn’t–’

‘You want to, don’t you?’

I had never been illusioned about Pat. And yet Margaret was reading something, as though through the feel of my arm: an obscure male freemasonry, or perhaps another kind of resistance she expected, whenever her judgments were more immediate and positive than mine.

We didn’t say much until we were inside our bedroom.

‘It’s squalid,’ said Margaret. ‘But that makes it worse for her.’

‘I’m sorry for her.’

‘I’m desperately sorry for her.’

Her indignation had gone by now, but her empathy was left.

‘I know,’ I said. I asked how Muriel was taking it.

‘That’s a curious thing,’ Margaret gave a sharp-eyed, puzzled smile. ‘She seems pretty cool about it. Cooler than I should have been, I tell you, if you’d left me having Charles and done the same.’

A good many women would have been cooler than that, I told her.

She burst out laughing. But when I repeated, how had Muriel reacted, her face became thoughtful, not only protective but mystified and sad. In her composed, demure fashion, Muriel had been evasive about her husband during previous visits; this time she had come out with it, still composed but clinical. Not a tear. Not even a show of temper.

‘What do they think they’re playing at?’ said Margaret. ‘He wasn’t in love with her, we never believed he was. He was after the main chance, blast him. But what about her? It doesn’t make sense. She must love him, mustn’t she?

‘After all,’ she went on, ‘she’s only twenty-two.’

A silence.

Margaret said: ‘I don’t understand them, do you?’

She was upset, and I tried to comfort her: and yet for her it was no use being reflective or resigned. For, though this mess was quite far away from her – it wasn’t all that dramatic or novel, and Muriel was no more than a young woman she knew by chance – it had touched, or become tangled with, some of her own expectations. None of us had expected more from all the kinds of love than Margaret. With her father, those afternoons as she sat by him in his loneliness, she had felt one of them finally denied: and with her sons also, as she grew older, there was another kind of isolation. Maurice passive, gentle, but with no flash of her own spirit coming back: Charles, who had spirit which matched hers, but who responded on his own terms. She had invested so much hope in what they would give her: and now, despite her sense, her irony, she sometimes felt cut off from the young. That was why Pat and his deserted wife became tokens for her: they made romantic love appear meaningless: all her expectations were dismissed, as though she belonged to another species. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell her, but I did no good. Unlike herself, so strong in trouble close to hand, that night – on the pretext or trigger of an acquaintance’s ill-treatment – she felt lonely and unavailing.

‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you’ll feel different when Carlo (our name for Charles) is back.’

‘What will he be like then?’ she said.

She asked, would he understand the situation of Pat and Muriel better than we did. Neither of us could guess. It was hard to believe that he had much in common with either.

7: Fair-mindedness

ON the afternoon of Christmas Day, Margaret and I were sitting in our drawing-room, along with Maurice, who had the day off from his hospital. Over the Park outside, the sky was low, unbroken: no rain, not cold, a kind of limbo of a December day. We had put off the Christmas meal until the evening, since my brother Martin and his wife and daughter were driving down from Cambridge. No newspapers, no letters, a timeless day. I suggested that we should go for a walk: Margaret looked at the cloud cover, and decided that it wasn’t inviting. Maurice, as usual glad to oblige, said that he would come with me.

We didn’t go into Hyde Park, but instead turned into the maze of streets between our flat and Paddington. Or rather I turned that way, for Maurice didn’t assert himself, and happily took what came. It wasn’t that he was a weak character: in his own fashion, he was a strong one; but it was a fashion so different from mine, or my own son’s, that I was no nearer knowing what he wanted, or where his life would go. Since he came to me, at the age of three, when I married Margaret, he and I had always got on well: there hadn’t been the subliminal conflict of egos that had occasionally broken out in my relation, on the surface ironic and amiable, with young Charles. Sometimes it seemed that Maurice didn’t have an ego. I had been concerned, because it made Margaret anxious, about his examination failures. I had also been concerned, because I was enough of a bourgeois born, about whether he would ever earn a living. Which had a certain practical interest, since otherwise I should have to go on supporting him.

He walked at my side, face innocent, good-looking, not feminine but unhardened for twenty-one. As usual, he was unprickly free from self: yet, I had often wondered, was that really true? It was the puzzle that one sometimes met in people who asked very little for themselves. They cared for others: they did good works and got nothing and claimed nothing: they had no rapacity or cruelty: so far as human beings could be, they were kind. Nevertheless, occasionally one felt – at least I did – that underneath they had a core more impregnable than most of ours. Somehow they were protected. Protected as some men are by shields of vanity or self-regard. Certainly Maurice made one feel that he was in less danger than any of us. Maybe it was that, more than his kindness, which made him so comfortable to be with.

Under the monotone sky, the high houses, also monotone, similar in period to the one where the Roses were living, more run-down. In the square, neon signs of lodging houses. Church built when the square was opulent (a million domestic servants in London then, and the slum-poor nowhere near these parts), Christmas trees lit up outside. Sleazy cafés on the road to Paddington station. A few people walking about, slowly, in the mild gloom. A scrum of West Indians arguing on the pavement. Christmas decorations in closed shops. Here and there on the high house-fronts lighted windows.

Once or twice Maurice reminded me of stories which he had told about those streets, for he knew them well. In his holidays he used to join a friend of his, the vicar of a local parish, on pastoral visits, making a curious, unsolemn and faintly comic pair, the vicar stout, be-cassocked and birettaed, Maurice as thin as a combination of the idiot prince and a first-class high-jumper. It was their way of enjoying themselves, and they had been inside many more rooms in the Paddington hinterland than the vicar’s duty called for. Yes, some of the sights weren’t pretty, Maurice had reported, unshockable: you could find most kinds of vice without going far. Also most kinds of suffering. Not the mass poverty of the thirties, that had been wiped out. But alcoholic’s poverty, drug addict’s poverty, pensioner’s poverty. Being poor when you’re old, though, that’s not the worst of it, Maurice had said. It’s being alone, day after day, with nothing to look forward to until you die. For once (it had happened one night when he returned home, a couple of years before), Maurice had spoken with something like violence. Genteel poverty behind lace curtains. A lucky person had a television set. If anyone feels like being superior about television, when they’re old they ought to live alone without one. You know, Maurice had gone on, they look forward to seeing Godfrey (the vicar) and me. I suppose one would if one were alone. Of course we can’t do much. We can just stay talking for half an hour. Anyway, Godfrey isn’t much good at conversation. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

As we walked along, solitary figures passing us in the empty streets, lighted windows in the houses, I was thinking, he had been behind some of those windows. They weren’t as taunting when one got inside as when one gazed at them from the street as a young man. For an instant, I was, not precisely remembering, but touched by a residual longing from, other Christmas days long past, when I had also gone out for walks on deserted pavements, just to kill time, just to get through the day. That had been so in the provincial town, after my mother died: slipping out after Christmas dinner, necessarily teetotal, at Aunt Milly’s, I used to tramp the streets as the afternoon darkened, gazing up garden paths at bright and curtained sitting-rooms, feeling a kind of arrogant envy. That had been so again, my first year in London: my friends all at home, no George Passant to pass the evening with, and I with nothing to do. The streets must have looked much as they did that day with Maurice, but that I had forgotten or repressed, and where I finished up the night.

‘Not exactly cheerful,’ I said, as though commenting on the present situation, indicating a young man who was dawdling past us.

‘Poor old thing,’ said Maurice, who really was commenting on the present situation. ‘He doesn’t look as if he’s got anywhere to go–’

For any connoisseur of townscapes, that afternoon’s had its own merit. The unvaried sky lay a thousand feet above the houses: the great city stretched all round one, but there was no sense of space: sky, houses, fairy lights on Christmas trees all pressed upon the lost pedestrians in the streets. Yes, the townscape had its own singular merit, but it was good to be back (did Maurice feel this too?) among the lights of our own drawing-room, able to find our own enclave.

To be realistic, it was not quite such a well-constructed enclave as it might have been. At least, not when we sat down to dinner. Physically all was well. The food was good, there was plenty to drink. But in Margaret, and in me watching her, the nerves were pricking beneath the skin. One reason everyone round the table knew. That was the first Christina. Charles had not been at home. Shortly he would be celebrating his seventeenth birthday in Karachi; for the time being he was static and safe. Then he would start his journey home, all over-land, travelling alone, picking up rides. The whole Eliot family was there, eating the Christmas dinner, except the youngest.

The whole Eliot family, though, that was a second reason for constraint, which perhaps, I couldn’t be certain, Martin and his wife didn’t realise. They had duly arrived, with their daughter Nina, while Maurice and I were out on our afternoon walk. We hadn’t seen any of them since the summer, at Pat’s wedding, but this family party had been planned long since. So, as a matter of course, Pat and Muriel had been invited. After Muriel’s disclosures, Margaret had asked her if she still wanted the pair of them to come. Yes, Muriel replied, without expression. There they were at dinner, Muriel on my left, by this time heavily pregnant, hazel eyes sharp, face tranquil, Pat on Margaret’s left, working hard to be a social stimulant.

It was difficult to know whether anything was being given away. Once Pat tried his brand of deferential cheek on Margaret: she was polite, but didn’t play. Pat, whose antennae, always active, were specially so that night, must have known what that meant. But his father and mother did not seem to notice. Maurice tried, like a quiet impresario, to make the best of Pat’s gambits. Margaret didn’t like dissimulating, but when she was keeping a secret she was as disciplined as I was. From the other end of the table, all I could have told – if she hadn’t warned me – was that she laughed very little, and that her laughter didn’t sound free. While Pat, whose brashness was subdued, kept exerting himself to make the party bubble, Martin was attending to him, with a faint amused incredulous smile which I had seen creep on him before in his son’s company – as though astonished that anyone so unguarded could be a son of his.

By my side, Irene didn’t often meet Pat’s quick frenetic brown-eyed glance, so like her own, but instead kept me engaged with Cambridge gossip. As she did so, I heard Muriel, voice clear and precise, taking part in repartee with Pat: no sign of strain, no disquiet that I could pick up. Later, I observed her talking to Nina, her sister-in-law, inconspicuous in her parents’ presence, more so in Pat’s. She might be inconspicuous, but she was a very pretty girl, so far as one could see her face, for she had hair, in the fashion of her contemporaries, which trailed over one eye. Also in the fashion, her voice was something like a whisper, and I couldn’t hear any of her replies to Muriel. Of the two, I was judging, most men would think her the prettier: but perhaps most men would think that Muriel provoked them more.

In the drawing-room after dinner, Muriel announced that, as this was a family Christmas party, she proposed to put off her bedtime. Very dutifully, Pat argued with her – ‘Darling, you know what — (her doctor) said?’

‘He’s not here, is he?’ said Muriel, and got her way. They didn’t leave until half past eleven: it was midnight before Martin and I sat by ourselves in my study, having a final drink.

Now at last it seemed to me like an ordinary family evening, peace descending upon the room. We hadn’t talked, except with others present, all that night: nor in fact since the summer, the day of our father’s funeral. Martin proceeded to interrogate me, in the way that had become common form since we grew older. Nowadays his workaday existence didn’t change from one term to another, while mine was still open to luck, either good or bad. So that our roles had switched, and he talked to me like a concerned older brother. How was the new book going? I was well into it, I said, but it would take another year. Was there anything in this rumour about my being called into the Government? He was referring to a piece of kite-flying by one of the parliamentary correspondents – New Recruits?

I knew no more about it than he did, I told him, and mentioned the conversation with Francis Getliffe in the Lords’ bar. This correspondent wrote as though he had been listening, or alternatively as though the House of Lords was bugged. As had happened often during my time in Whitehall, I had the paranoid feeling that about half the population of Parliament were in newspaper pay.

I had heard nothing more, I repeated to Martin. I supposed it was possible. They knew me pretty well. But it would be a damned silly thing for me to do. ‘Oh, if they do ask you, don’t turn it down out of hand,’ said Martin, watchful, tutorial, as cautious as old Arthur Brown. He went on, he could see certain advantages, and I said with fraternal sarcasm, that it was a pity he ever withdrew from the great world. Great World, I rubbed it in. We both know enough about it, partly by experience, partly by nature. Martin gave his pulled-down grin.

He would like just one more drink, he said, and went over to the sideboard. Then, as he settled back in his chair, glance turned towards his glass, he said, in a casual tone: ‘I don’t think Irene knows anything about these goings-on.’

‘What do you mean?’ It was a mechanical question. I had understood.

‘That young man of ours playing round.’ Pat’s Christian name was actually Lewis, after me, and Martin seldom referred to him by his self-given name. Suddenly Martin looked full at me with hard blue eyes.

‘I gathered you had heard,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t know.’

That seemed to give him an obscure satisfaction. Irene had never liked the marriage, although it had taken Pat off their hands, providing him with the money he had never earned.

‘Did you realise’, I asked, ‘that we knew – before tonight?’

‘Never mind that.’ He wouldn’t answer, and left me curious. He might have picked it up in the air, for he was a perceptive man. But I thought it sounded as though he had been told. By whom? He was not intimate with his daughter-in-law. Bizarre as it seemed, it was more likely to be his son. Martin felt for his son the most tenacious kind of parental love. It was, Martin knew it all by heart, so did Margaret, so did Azik Schiff, so did Mr Marsh and old Winslow long before we did, the most one-sided of human affections, the one which lasts longest and for long periods gives more pain than joy. And yet, one-sided though such a relation as Martin’s and his son’s had to be, it took two to make a possessive love. With some sons it couldn’t endure; if it did endure, there had to be a signal – sometimes the call for help – the other way. Pat had cost his father disappointment and suffering: there had been quarrels, lies, deceits: but in the midst of it all there was, and still remained, a kind of communication, so that in trouble he went back, shameless and confiding, and gave Martin a new lease of hope.

The result was that Martin, who was usually as quick as any man to see the lie in life, who had an acute nose for danger, was talking that night as though I were the one to be reassured. He did it – I had heard him speak of his son in this tone before – with an air of apparent realism. Yes, there must be plenty of young men, mustn’t there, who think of amusing themselves elsewhere in the first year of marriage. No one was ever really honest about the sexual life. How many of us made fantasies year after year? There weren’t many who would confess their fantasies, or admit or face what their sexual life had been.

I didn’t interrupt him, but he could have guessed what I was thinking. Did he remember, earlier that year in our native town, how we had talked during the murder trial? Talked without cover or excuses, unlike tonight. There was a gap between fantasy and action, the psychiatric witnesses had been comfortably saying. It was a gap that only the psychopaths or those in clinical terms not responsible managed to cross. That made life more acceptable, pushed away the horrors into a corner of their own. Martin wouldn’t accept the consolation. It was too complacent for him, he had said, as we sat in the hotel bar, talking more intimately than we had ever done.

Now, Martin, swirling the whisky in his glass, looked across the study from his armchair to mine.

‘I agree,’ he said, as though with fair-mindedness, ‘not so many people act out their fantasies. But still, this business of his must be fairly common, mustn’t it? You know, I’m pretty sure that I could have done the same.’

Shortly afterwards, he made an effort to sound more fair-minded still.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to face the fact that he might turn into a layabout.’

He used the objective word, his voice was sternly objective. Yet he was about as much so as Francis Getliffe complaining (with a glow of happiness concealed) that people said his son Leonard was a class better as a scientist than himself. Both of them liked to appear detached. It made Martin feel clear-minded, once he had suggested that the future might be bad. But he didn’t believe it. He was still thinking of his son as the child who had been winning, popular, anxious to make people happy – and capable of all brilliant things.

‘I thought they were getting on all right tonight, didn’t you?’ said Martin. ‘He’ll shake down when the baby is born, you know. It will make all the difference, you’ll see.’

He gave a smile which was open and quite unironic. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t have believed that he was a pessimistic man.

8: Sight of a New Life

THE New Year opened more serenely for Margaret and me than many in the past. True, each morning as the breakfast tray came in, she looked for letters from Maurice or Charles, just as one used to in a love affair, when letters counted more. And, as in a love affair, the fact that Charles was thousands of miles away sometimes seemed to slacken his hold on her. Distance, as much as time, did its own work. Reading one of Charles’ despatches, she was relieved that he was well: but she was joyful when she heard from Maurice. Sometimes I wondered, if she and I could have had other children, whom she would have loved the most.

The flat was quiet, so many rooms empty, with us and the housekeeper living there alone. Mornings working in the study, afternoons in the drawing-room, the winter trees in the park below. Visits to Margaret’s father, back to the evening drink. Once out of the hospital, it was all serene, and there was nothing to disturb us. As for our acquaintances, we heard that Muriel was moving into Azik Schiff’s house to have her baby – Eaton Square, Azik laying on doctors and nurses, that suited him appropriately enough. Margaret kept up her visits to her, as soon as she was installed, which was towards the end of January, with the baby due in a couple of weeks.

About six o’clock one evening, the birth expected any day now, there was a ring at our hall door. As I opened it, Pat was standing on the threshold. There wasn’t likely to be a more uninvited guest. I knew there couldn’t be any news, for Margaret had not long returned from Eaton Square. He entered with his shameless smile, ingratiating and also defiant.

‘As a matter of fact, Uncle Lewis,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘I would rather like a word with Aunt Meg.’

He followed me into the drawing-room, where Margaret was sitting. She said good evening in a tone that he couldn’t have thought indulgent (it was the first time she had seen him since the Christmas dinner), but he went and kissed her cheek.

‘Do you mind’, he said, bright-faced, ‘if I help myself to a drink?’

He poured himself a whisky and soda, and then sat on a chair near to her.

‘Aunt Meg,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to ask you a favour.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to let us call this child after you.’

For once Margaret was utterly astonished, her face wide open with surprise, and yes, for an instant, with pleasure.

Her first response was uncollected. ‘Why, you don’t know whether it’s going to be a girl.’

‘I’m sure it will be.’

‘You can’t be sure–’

‘I want a girl. I want to call it after you.’

His tone was masterful and wooing. Watching with a certain amusement from the other side of the room (I had not often seen anyone try this kind of blandishment on her), I saw her eyes sharpen.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘Mine, of course, what do you think?’

Margaret’s voice was firm.

‘What does Muriel say?’

‘Oh, she’s in favour. You’d expect her to be in favour, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know, she might be.’ Margaret hadn’t altered her expression. ‘But she hasn’t quite your reasons, after all.’

‘Oh come, Aunt Meg, I just want to show how much I feel for you–’ For the first time he was protesting – as though he had just recognised that he was no longer in control.

‘When did you think this up?’

‘A long time ago, months ago, you know how you think about names.’

‘How long ago did you hear that Muriel had told me?’

‘Oh that–’

‘You don’t like being unpopular, do you?’

‘Come on, Aunt Meg, you’re making too much of it.’

‘Am I?’

He threw his head back, spread his arms, gave a wide penitential grimace, and said: ‘You know what I’m like!’

She looked at him with a frown, some sort of affection there: ‘Is that genuine?’

‘You know what I’m like, I’ve never pretended much.’

‘But, when you say that, it means you’re really satisfied with yourself, don’t you see? Of course, you want to make promises, you want us all to be fond of you again, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? But really you don’t feel there’s anything gone wrong–’

‘Now you’re being unfair.’

Even then, he wasn’t ready to be totally put down. Apologetic, yes – but, still, people did things, didn’t they? People did things that hurt her and perhaps they couldn’t help themselves. Like her father. There were others who didn’t feel as she did. Somehow Pat had discovered, it must have been from Davidson himself, that once he had applied to us for drugs. Still, he found someone else, didn’t he, said Pat, not brashly but with meaning. ‘It’s no use expecting us to be all the same.’

Margaret told him that he was making things too comfortable for himself. For a time they were talking with a curious intimacy, the intimacy of a quarrel, more than that, something like understanding. It was easy to imagine him, I thought, behaving like this to his wife when she had found him out, penitent, flattering, inventive, tender and in the end unmoved.

But Margaret didn’t give him much. Soon, she cut off the argument, She wasn’t responsible for his soul or his actions, she said: but she was responsible for any words of hers that got through to Muriel. It sounded as though she wanted to issue a communiqué after a bout of diplomatic negotiations, but Margaret knew very well what she was doing. Pat, as a source of information, particularly as a source of information about his own interests, was not, in the good old Dostoevskian phrase, a specially reliable authority. He was not, Margaret repeated, to give any version of this conversation. He was not to report that Margaret would like a girl to be called after her. Margaret herself would mention the proposal to Muriel the next time she saw her.

Pat knew the last word when he heard it. With a good grace, with a beaming doggy smile, he said, Taken as read, and helped himself to another drink. Soon afterwards, he knew also that it was time for him to go.

Did he expect to get away with it, I was speculating, not intervening, although Pat had tried to involve me once or twice. Like most bamboozlers or conmen, he assumed that no one could see through him. More often than not, bamboozlers took in no one but themselves. In fact, Margaret had seen through him from the start. Of course, the manoeuvre was a transparent one, even by his standards. He had studied how to slide back into favour; he may have thought of other peace offerings, before he decided what would please her most. Incidentally, he had chosen right. But a woman didn’t need to be as clear-sighted as Margaret to see him coming, gift in hand.

So he had, with his usual cheek, put his money down and lost it. Lost most of it, but perhaps not all. Margaret thought him as worthless as before, perhaps more so: she knew more of his tricks; he had even ceased to be interesting; and yet, despite herself, sarcastic at her own expense, she was, after that failure of his, left feeling a shade more kindly towards him.

Muriel, as usual polite and friendly, did not give away her thoughts about the baby’s name, so Margaret told me. ‘I’ve got an idea she’s made her own decision,’ said Margaret. If that were so, we never knew what it was. For the child, born a few days later, turned out to be a boy. He was to be called, Margaret heard the first time she saw him, Roy Joseph. And those names were certainly Muriel’s own decision, Margaret was sure of that. In fact, Muriel had said that she would have liked to call the boy after her stepfather, but you couldn’t use Azik if you weren’t a Jew. So she fell back on Roy, after her own father, and threw in Joseph, which was one of Azik’s other names.

Anyway, whatever the marriage was like, this was a fine little boy, said Margaret, and took me to see him on her next visit, when he was not yet a week old.

The first time I went inside a prosperous house in London nearly forty years earlier, I had been greeted by a butler. In Azik Schiff’s house in Eaton Square, one was also greeted by a butler. That didn’t often happen, in the London of the sixties. But even Azik, many times richer than old Mr March, couldn’t recruit the footmen and the army of maids I used to meet in the March household. Still, the Eaton Square house was grander, different in kind from those most of our friends lived in – the comfortable flats, the Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead houses of professional London. So far as that went, Azik wouldn’t have considered adequate for his purposes the politicians’ houses in Westminster, a good deal richer, that I used to know.

Azik, as he liked to announce, was fond of spending money. In the hall at Eaton Square, the carpets were deep: round the walls there were pictures which might have belonged to the antechamber of a good, though somewhat conventional, municipal gallery. That was true of Azik’s pictures throughout the house. His taste wasn’t adventurous, as Austin Davidson’s had been. Azik had bought nothing later than the Impressionists, except for one Cézanne. He had been cautious, out of character for him, perhaps not trusting either his judgment or his eye. But he had a couple of Sisleys, a Boudin, a Renoir, a Ruysdael – he might have been cautious, but we coveted them each time we went inside his house.

Getting out of the lift, which was one of Azik’s innovations, Margaret led me to the master bedroom on the third floor, the whole of which Azik had made over to his stepdaughter. Inside the high light bedroom (through the window one could see the tops of trees in the private garden), Muriel was sitting up in bed, a great four-poster bed, a wrap round her shoulders, looking childish, prim, undecorated. She said, Good afternoon, Uncle Lewis, with that old-fashioned correctness of hers, which often seemed as though she were smiling to herself or pretending to drop a curtsey.

‘It’s very good of you to come,’ she said.

I said no.

‘Aunt Margaret likes babies. It can’t be much fun for you.’

Margaret put in that I had been good, when Charles was a baby.

‘That was duty, though,’ said Muriel, looking straight at me. I was, as often, disconcerted by her, not sure whether she had a double meaning, or whether she meant anything at all.

She made some conversation about Charles, the first time I had heard her mention him. Then there was a hard raucous cry from a room close by, from what must have been the dressing-room.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said, with composure.

‘Oh, come on, let’s have him in,’ said Margaret.

‘That will be boring for Uncle Lewis, though.’

With other young women, that might have seemed coy. Not so with her. I told her that I hadn’t expected to wait so long. She gave a grin which made her look less decorous, and pressed the bell by her bedside.

As a nurse carried in the baby, Margaret said: ‘Let me have him, just for a minute.’

She pressed the bundle, arms slowly waving, to her, and looked down at him, with her expression softened by delight.

‘I do envy you,’ she said to Muriel, and from the tone I was sure that remark had been made before. Yet Margaret’s pleasure was as simple as it could be, all the life in her just joyful at the feel of life.

She passed the child to his mother, who settled him against her and said, in a clear voice: ‘Hallo, old man.’

It might have happened, it almost certainly must have happened, that my mother showed me Martin soon after he was born. But if so I had totally forgotten it, and everything to do with his birth, except that I had been sent to my aunt’s for a couple of days. No, the only days-old baby I remembered seeing was my son. The aimless, rolling eyes, the hands drifting round like an anemone’s fibrils. As a spectacle, this was the same. Perhaps the difference, to a photographic eye, was that this child, under the thin flaxen hair, had a high crown to his head, the kind of steeple crown Muriel’s father had once possessed.

But when I first saw my son it hadn’t been with a photographic eye. It hadn’t even been with emotion, but something fiercer and more animal, so strong that, though it was seventeen years ago, it didn’t need bringing back to memory; it was there. That afternoon in Muriel’s bedroom, perversely, I did watch the pair of them, mother and baby, with something like emotion, the sort of emotion which is more or less tender, more or less self-indulgent, which doesn’t trouble one. My brother’s grandson. Roy Calvert’s grandson. Would this child ever know anything about Roy Calvert, who had passed into a private mythology by now? How much did I recollect of what he had been truly like?

This child would live a different life from ours, and, of course, with any luck, live on when our concerns, and everything about us, had been long since swept away. Did one envy a life that was just beginning? Pity for what might happen, that was there. Pity was deeper than the thought he would live after one. But, yes, the impulse for life was organic; in time it would overmaster all the questions; it would prevail over pity; all one would feel was the strength of a new life.

9: Pieces of News

SEVERAL afternoons that April, Margaret and I walked through the empty flat to an empty bedroom, making quite unnecessary inspections in time for Charles’ return. It was the room he had occupied since he was three years old: not the one where we had watched him in his one grave illness, because after that, out of what was sheer superstition, we had made a change. This was the room, though, to which he had come back on holidays from school.

From the window, there was the view over Tyburn gardens which I had seen so often, waking him in the morning, that now I didn’t see at all. The shelves round the room were stacked with books, which, with a streak of possessive conservatism, he refused to have touched: the geological strata of his books since he began to read, children’s stories, C S Lewis, Henry Treece, other historical novels, Shakespeare, Latin texts, Greek texts, Russian texts, political treatises, modern histories, school prizes, Dostoevsky. Under the shelves were piles of games, those also not to be touched. Once or twice Margaret glanced at them as the wife of Pastor Brand might have done. We didn’t know where he was, nor precisely when to expect him. There had been a cable from Constantinople, asking for money. He had had to stop for days in an Anatolian village; that was all the news.

‘Well,’ said Margaret, looking at the childhood room, ‘I think it’s how he likes it, isn’t it? I hope he will.’

On the bright chilly April days we were listening for the telephone. But, while we were waiting for news of him, we received other news which we weren’t waiting for: two other pieces of news for which we were utterly unprepared, arriving in the same twenty-four hours.

The first came in the morning post, among a batch of press cuttings. It was an article from a paper, which, though it was well known, I didn’t usually read. The title was simply Secret Society, and at the first glance was an attack on the new Government’s ‘back-room pundits’. There was nothing specially new in that. The Government was already unpopular with the Press: this paper was thought of as an organ of the centre, but a lot of abuse was coming from the centre. Like most people who had lived or written in public, I was used to the sight of my own name, I was at the same time reading and not reading. Lord Getliffe. Mounteney. Constantine and Arthur Miles. Sir Walter Luke. Sir Lewis Eliot…

The writer didn’t like us at all, not any of us. That didn’t matter much. What did matter was that he had done some research. Some of his facts were wrong or twisted, but quite a number true. He had done some neat detective work on the meetings (‘grey eminence’ meetings) which we used to hold, through the years when the present Government was in opposition, in Brown’s Hotel. He reported in detail how Francis had been offered a post in October; he knew the time of Francis’ visit to Downing Street, not only the day but the hour. But what made me angry was the simple statement that the same offer might soon be made to me.

Whatever I said, I shouldn’t be believed, I told Margaret. No correction made any difference. That was an invariable rule of public life.

‘It’s a nuisance,’ she said.

‘It’s worse than that. If they were thinking of asking me, they wouldn’t now.’

‘That doesn’t matter. You know it doesn’t.’

‘Even things I don’t specially want, I don’t like these people sabotaging. Which, of course, is the whole idea.’

Margaret said – and it was true – that I was upset out of all proportion.

That afternoon, Margaret went out, and it was after teatime before she joined me in the drawing-room. She looked at me: she knew, better than anyone, that my moods, once set, were hard for me to break, and that I had been regressing to the morning’s news.

‘I’ve got something else for you,’ she said.

I replied, without interest. ‘Have you?’

‘I’ve been to see Muriel.’

That didn’t stir me. I said again: ‘Oh, have you?’

‘She’s got rid of Pat.’

At last I was listening.

‘She’s got rid of him.’

‘Does she mean it?’

‘Oh yes, she means it. It’s for good and all.’

Margaret said, she hadn’t begun to guess. Nor had I. Nor, so far as we knew, had Azik or Rosalind. Possibly not the young man himself. It was true, Muriel had remained at Eaton Square, a couple of months now since the baby was born: but that seemed to us like a spoiled young woman who enjoyed being looked after. Not a bit of it. During that time she had, with complete coolness, telling no one except her solicitor, been organising the break. Her solicitor was to dispose of the Chelsea flat: he was to buy a house where she would take the baby. She had sent for Pat the evening before, just to tell him that she didn’t wish to see him again and that an action for divorce would, of course, go through. So far as Margaret could gather, Muriel had been entirely calm during this interview, much less touched by Pat’s entreaties, wiles, sorrows and even threats than Margaret herself on a less critical occasion. It seemed to me strangely like Muriel’s father disposing of a college servant. In a methodical, businesslike fashion she had, immediately he left, written him a letter confirming what she had just said.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Margaret.

We felt, for the moment, nothing but surprise. It was clear that Muriel had made her decision months ago, kept it to herself, not altered it by a tremor, and worked out her plans. She didn’t seem heartbroken: she didn’t even seem outraged: she just behaved as though she had had enough of him. As we talked, Margaret and I were lost, neither of us could give any kind of insight, or even rationalisation. Why had she married him? Had she been determined to escape from a possessive mother? Her life, until she was twenty, had been shielded, by the standards of the day. Rosalind was both worldly and as watchful as a detective, and it had been difficult for Muriel not to stay a virgin. Perhaps Pat had been the most enterprising young man round her. Certainly he had contrived to seduce her: but there might have been some contrivance on her part too, so that she became pregnant and stopped any argument against the marriage. Yet all that seemed too mechanical to sound true. Was she one of those who were sexually avid and otherwise cold? Somehow that didn’t sound true either. Was it simply his running after women that made her tired of him? Or was that an excuse? She might have plans for the future, but if so those too she was keeping to herself. She might be looking for another husband. Alternatively, it seemed as likely that she had no use for men. Neither Margaret nor I would trust our judgment either way. She had her child, and that she must have wanted; Margaret said that in a singular manner, on the surface undisturbed, she was a devoted mother.

While we were still talking, still mystified – it must have been getting on for seven – there were Italian cries, our housekeeper’s, penetrating to us from rooms away, cries that soon we made out as excited greetings, which must come from the front door. ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ she was shouting, and Charles entered the room.

As Margaret embraced him, she broke out: ‘Why didn’t you let us know?’

‘Anyway, I’m here.’

He needed a shave, he was wearing a jacket, roll-top sweater and dirty jeans. It was the first time I had seen him sunburnt, and he wasn’t over-clean after the travel. He looked healthy but thin, his face, high-cheekboned, masculine, already set in the pattern that would stay until he was old. He stretched out on the sofa, long feet protruding over the end.

I asked him to have a drink. After Islamic countries, he was out of practice, he said: yes, he would like a gin. He began to describe his route home: we wanted to hear, we were glad to have him there, we were trying to throw off the beginning of the day. He was in high spirits, like one who has made a good voyage. Suddenly he threw his legs off the sofa, sat up straight, gazed at me with alert eyes.

‘You’re looking sombre,’ he said.

Of Margaret and me, I was the one whose face he could read the quicker.

I said something evasive and putting off.

‘You’ve got something on your mind.’

I hesitated, said no again, and then reached out for the press cutting.

‘I suppose you’ll have to see this sooner or later,’ I said as I handed it over.

With a scrutinising frown, Charles read, and gave a short deep curse.

‘They’re not specially fond of you, are they?’

‘One thing I’m worried about’, I said, ‘is that all this may rebound on you.’

‘I shall have worse than that to cope with.’

‘It may be a drag–’

‘Never mind that.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I told him.

‘You’re not to worry about me.’ Then he said, in an even tone: ‘I told you years ago, didn’t I, I won’t be worried about.’ He said it as though it were a good-natured domestic jibe: that was ninety per cent of the truth, but not quite all.

Then, he tapped the cutting, and said he hadn’t read English newspapers for months until that day. He had got hold of the morning’s editions on the way over. There was one impression that hit him in the eye: how parochial, how inward-looking, this country had become. Parish-pump politics. Politics looked quite different from where he had been living. ‘This isn’t politics,’ he said, looking contemptuously at the cutting. ‘But it’s how this country is behaving. If we’re becoming as provincial as this, how do we get out of it?’

He was saying that vigorously, with impatience, not with gloom. In the same energetic fashion, he said: ‘Well then, is that all the bad news for the present?’

That was an old family joke, derived from the time when he began to read Greek plays.

‘The rest isn’t quite so near home,’ I answered. ‘But still, it’s bad news for someone. You tell him,’ I said to Margaret.

As he heard about Muriel, he was nothing like so impatient. He was concerned and even moved, more than we had been, to an extent which took us by surprise. So far as I knew, he had had little to do with his cousin, and both Pat and Muriel were five years older than he was. Yet he spoke about them as though they were his own kind. Certainly he did not wish to hear us blaming either of them. He didn’t say one word of criticism himself. This was a pity – that was as far as he would go. Still with stored-up energy, poised on the balls of his feet, he declared that he would visit them.

‘They might tell me more than they’ve told you,’ he said.

‘Yes, they might,’ said Margaret. ‘But Carlo, I’m sure it’s gone too far–’

‘You can’t be sure.’

Margaret said that it was Muriel who had to be persuaded, and there weren’t many people with a stronger will. Charles wasn’t being argumentative, but he wouldn’t give up: and, strangely enough, his concern broke through in a different place, and one which, taken by surprise, we had scarcely thought of.

‘If they can’t be stopped,’ he remarked, ‘it’s going to be a blow for Uncle Martin, isn’t it?’

There had always been sympathy between Martin and Charles, and in some ways their temperaments were similar, given that Charles’ was the more highly charged. Charles knew a good deal about Martin’s relation with his son, even though it was one that he wouldn’t have accepted for himself and would, in Pat’s place, have shrugged off. But now he was thinking of what Martin hoped for. Incidentally, where would Pat propose to live? The studio, where he had conscientiously worked at his painting, would be lost along with the Chelsea flat. But there Charles showed a spark of the irony which had for the past half-hour deserted him. He admitted that even he couldn’t pretend that Pat was not a born survivor.

10: Possible Heavens

THROUGH the following days and weeks, right into the early summer, there was plenty of toing and froing – the bread and butter of a family trouble, trivial to anyone outside – of which I heard only at second or third hand. I knew that Pat had been to see Margaret two or three times, begging her to intercede, or, in his own phrase, ‘tell her I’m not so bad’. Margaret had, I guessed, been kind and taken the edge off her tongue: but certainly she had told him there was nothing she could do.

Charles spent several evenings with both Muriel and Pat, but kept the secrets to himself, or at least from his mother and me. All I learned was that at one stage he invoked Maurice, at home for a weekend from the hospital. The two of them, and Pat’s sister Nina, now studying music in London, met in Charles’ room at our flat, and I believed that Maurice, who had an influence over his contemporaries, went out to make a plea, though to which of them I didn’t know. One day Martin telephoned me, saying that he was in London and was having a conference with the Schiffs: he made an excuse for not coming to see me afterwards. That was a matter of pride, and it was just as I might have behaved myself.

On an afternoon early in June, I took Charles with me on one of my routine visits to his grandfather. In the taxi, I was warning Charles that he wasn’t going to enjoy it: this wouldn’t be like his last sight of my own father, comic in his own eyes, happy in his stuffy little room. He had been stoical because be didn’t know any other way to be: while Austin Davidson was putting on the face of stoicism, but – without confessing it to anyone round him – was dying, but bitterly. I was warning Charles: in secret I was preparing myself for the next hour. For, though those visits might have seemed a drill by now, I couldn’t get used to them. The cool words I had trained myself to, in reply to Davidson’s, like rallies in a game of ping-pong: but there hadn’t been one single visit when, as soon as I got out of the clinic into the undemanding air, I didn’t feel liberated; as though solitariness and an inadmissible boredom, by the side of someone I admired, had been lifted from me. That was as true or truer, nearly a year later, as when I first saw him after his attempt at death.

In the sunny green-reflecting bedroom, Austin Davidson was in the familiar posture, head and shoulders on high pillows, looking straight in front of him, feet and ankles bare. He didn’t turn his eyes, as the door opened. I said: ‘I’ve brought Carlo to see you.’

‘Oh, have you?’

He looked round, and slowly from under the sheet drew out a thin hand, on which stood out the veins and freckles of old age. As Charles took it, he said: ‘How are you, grandpa?’

Davidson produced a good imitation – perhaps it was more than that – of his old Mephistophelian smile.

‘Well, Carlo, you wouldn’t want me to tell you a lie, would you?’

Their eyes met. They each had the same kind of cheekbones. Even now, it was easy to see what Davidson had looked like as a young man. But, though I might be imagining it, I thought his face had become puffier these last few weeks; some of the bone structure, handsome until he was old, was being smeared out now.

Charles gave a smile, a smile of recognition, in return.

‘Also,’ said Davidson, ‘you wouldn’t like me to give you an honest answer either, don’t you know?’

Charles gave the same firm smile again, and sat down by the bed, on the side opposite to me. For a while Austin Davidson seemed pleased with his own repartee, or, perhaps more exactly, with the performance he was putting up. Then he began to show signs, which I hadn’t expected, of something like disappointment, as though he were a child who, out of good manners, couldn’t protest at not being given a treat. That was a surprise, for he had, even in illness, displayed a liking for Charles, and had occasionally asked for his company. Not that Davidson had much family sense, few men less: but of his descendants and relatives, Charles, I fancied, appeared most like the young men Davidson had grown up with. Yet now he wished that Charles was out of the way.

Then, when Davidson couldn’t resist a complaint: ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect Carlo to take an intelligent interest–’ I had it. Charles couldn’t pick up the reference: but by now Davidson, always obsessive, had become addicted to our afternoon ritual, first what he called ‘intelligent conversation’ (that is, about the Stock Market), and then his reflections on dying. His interests had narrowed to that. It still seemed to me harrowing that in that clinical room, afternoon following afternoon, we talked about Stock Exchange prices. I had to tell him what he had gained or lost by his last investment. It was purely symbolic: money had not mattered much to him, except as an intellectual game, and nothing could matter less now. Yet there was something triumphant about his interest, as though he had proved that one could be pertinacious to the end.

However, that afternoon, with Charles present, he was deprived. For a time he fell into silence, indrawn. Whether he was wondering if he ought to talk about death in front of Charles, I didn’t know. Probably he didn’t trouble himself. Austin Davidson used to feel, as only a delicate man could feel, that it was invariably wrong to be over-delicate. At any rate, after a while he produced a question.

‘Carlo. If you believed in an afterlife, which by definition is impossible, which of the various alternatives so far proposed for the afterlife would you prefer?’

Davidson’s sepia eyes were shining, as though gratified to be talking again.

‘Meaning what in the way of alternatives?’ Charles was good at catching the tone.

‘Any that you’ve ever heard of.’

Charles considered.

‘They’re all pretty dim,’ he said.

‘Granted. There’s not much to be said for the human imagination.’

‘I suppose there may be something outside this world–’

I thought, Charles wasn’t used to the Edwardian brand of unbelief.

‘That hasn’t any meaning. No, people have always been inventing heavens. All ridiculous. Now you’re asked to name the one you fancy.’

Gazing at the old man, Charles realised that he had to play this game according to the rules.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Valhalla.’

Davidson gave a genuine smile.

‘Not so good, Carlo. Just like a regimental mess.’

‘Good stories,’ said Charles.

‘My God. Listening to rather stupid hearties talking about battles for all eternity.’

‘That would be better than listening to harps, wouldn’t it?’

‘I put it about equal. But all that boozing–’

Like nearly all his circle, Davidson had never gone in much for drink. I recalled, years before I met Margaret, being taken by a Cambridge friend to a party in Gordon Square. The hosts – we now knew from the biographies – had been intimates of Davidson’s and brother Apostles. The thinking might have been high, but the entertainment was austere.

‘One would get used to it after the first thousand years, I think.’

They kept up the exchange, Charles doing his share as though this were a natural piece of chit-chat. Whether it cost him an effort, I couldn’t be sure. His face was grave, but so it had to be to match Davidson’s fancy, while Davidson’s spirits, so long as they could go on talking, were lighter than I had felt them for weeks past. After the two of them had exhausted the topic of putative heavens, Davidson didn’t relapse into the dark silence, when it seemed his eyes turned inward, that I had sat through so often in that room. Instead, and this was very rare, for even Margaret he scarcely mentioned when I visited him, he brought a new person into the conversation.

‘Oh that young man, what’s he called, your nephew–’ he said to me, and I supplied the name. ‘Yes. He came in here the other day. He’s been to see me once or twice, don’t you know.’

Yes, I knew.

‘I gather he’s having some sort of trouble with his wife.’

It was an extraordinary place to come and confide, but Pat, I thought, wasn’t above searching for comfort or allies anywhere.

I said that his wife had turned him out.

‘Can’t someone make her be sensible? It’s all remarkably uncivilised.’

His tone was stern and complaining. That was a word of condemnation, one of the very few he ever used. He began to talk about his own friends. They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometrical figures, well then, one accepted that too. Of course jealousy sometimes intruded: but jealousy had to be kept in its place. They believed in pleasure, said Davidson. If you didn’t believe in pleasure, you couldn’t be civilised.

Davidson wasn’t wandering, I hadn’t heard him do so since the first morning in the clinic. Lucidly he returned to his starting point. Muriel was being uncivilised. Of course, Pat might have gone in for a certain amount of old-fashioned adultery. What of it? He wanted to preserve the marriage.

‘I should have thought’, said Davidson, ‘that he was a man of fundamentally decent feeling.’

I should have liked to discover what Charles made of that judgment. He had been listening with absorption to Davidson speaking of his friends: at Charles’ age, though this was his grandfather talking, that period, that coterie, must already have passed into history and have seemed as remote, as preserved in time, as the pre-Raphaelites. Would they have a glamour for Charles? Or would he detest their kind of enlightenment, what Davidson had just called being ‘civilised’, as much as his mother did?

We had stayed in the bedroom – I was used to looking at my watch below Davidson’s eye level in that room – half an hour longer than I set myself. But when I began to move, muttering the ‘Well–’ which begins to set one free, he said he would like us to stay a little longer. He realised we were unlikely to share his opinion, he remarked with a flicker of the old devil, but he was having a mildly diverting afternoon.

11: Replica of a Group

IT was getting on for a month later, on an afternoon when Margaret was taking her turn to visit Austin Davidson, that Azik Schiff rang up: would I call round at his house, he wanted (using an idiom known only to Azik) to include me in the picture. High summer in Eaton Square, trees dense with foliage, leaves dark under the bright sun, car bonnets flashing. The major rooms in Azik’s house were on the second floor, a kind of piano nobile, and there in the long drawing-room, standing in front of his Renoir, Azik greeted me. He gave his face-splitting froglike smile, called me ‘my friend’, put his arm round my shoulders and conducted me to a sofa where Rosalind was sitting. Then there was conferring about whether it was too late for tea, or too early for a drink. Both of them, Azik in particular, were making more than their normal fuss of me, trying to wrap me round with warmth.

When we were settled down, welcomes insisted on, Azik put his hands on his thick thighs, and said, like one at home with negotiations: ‘Lewis, my friend, you are not a principal in this matter. But we thought you ought to be informed.’

‘After all, you’re his uncle, aren’t you?’ Rosalind said appeasingly, but as though raising an unnecessary doubt.

I said, I had heard so many rumours, I should be grateful for some facts.

‘Ah, it is the young who have been talking.’

‘Not to me,’ I said.

‘Your son is a fine young man.’

I explained, I hadn’t a clear idea what he had been doing.

‘It makes no difference,’ said Azik. ‘It is all settled. Like that–’ he swept his arm.

‘She’s as obstinate as a pig, she always was,’ said Rosalind.

Azik gave a brisk businesslike account. Nothing had affected Muriel. Not that that was different from what I had expected: I imagined that she had stayed polite and temperate all through. While others had been arguing with her, giving advice, making appeals, she had been quietly working with her solicitor. The Chelsea flat had been sold (‘at a fair price’, said Azik): she had bought a house in Belgravia, and moved into it, along with child and nurse, the day before. The transaction had gone through so fast that Azik assumed that it must have been started months ago.

‘Remember, my friend, she is well provided for. She is independent with her money. We have no sanctions to use against her. Even if we were sure of our own ground.’

All of a sudden, Rosalind went into a tirade, her face forgetting the gentility of years and her voice its dying fall. She began by being furious with her daughter. After all her, Rosalind’s, care. Not to be able to keep a man. To get into a mess like this. No gratitude. No consideration. Making her look like an idiot. But really she was being as protective, or as outraged at not being able to be so, as when her daughter was a child. Rosalind’s sophistication had dropped clean away – her marriages, her remarkable talent for being able to love where it was advantageous to love, her climb from the suburbs of our native town to Eaton Square, her adventures on the way, all gone.

She had forgotten how she had campaigned to capture Muriel’s father, who, when one came down to earth, had not been much more stable with women than Pat himself. As for Pat, Rosalind felt simple hate. Twister. Gigolo. Expecting to be paid for his precious–. Rosalind’s language, when she was calm, could be slightly suggestive, but now there was no suggestion about it. One comfort, he had got what was coming to him. Then he went whining round. Rosalind began to use words that Azik perhaps had never heard, and that I hadn’t since I was young. Mardy. Mardyarse. How any child of hers, Rosalind shouted, could have been taken in by a drip like that – .

‘She has to make her own mistakes, perhaps,’ said Azik, in a tone soothing but not quite assured, as though this violence in his wife was a novelty with which he hadn’t had much practice.

Rosalind: Who was she going to pick up next?

Azik: We have to try and put her in the way of some nice young men.

Rosalind: We’ve done that, since she was seventeen. And look what happens.

Azik: We have to go on trying. These young people don’t like being managed. But perhaps there will be a piece of luck.

Rosalind: She’ll pick another bit of rubbish.

Azik: We must try. As long as she doesn’t know we’re trying.

The dialogue went on across me, like an argument in the marriage bed, Rosalind accusing, Azik consolatory. It wasn’t the first of these arguments, one felt: perhaps the others, like this, faded away into doldrums, when Azik, still anxious to placate his wife, had time to turn to me.

‘There is something I have already said to Martin,’ he told me. ‘Now I shall say it to you, Lewis, my friend.’

I looked at him.

‘I should be sorry if this business of these young people made any break between your family and ours. I must say, I should be sorry. It will not happen from our side.’

He spoke with great dignity. Uxorious as he was, he spoke as though that was his decision, and Rosalind had to obey. Loyally, making herself simmer down, she said that she and I had known each other for thirty years. On the other hand, I was thinking, I should be surprised if she went out of her way to meet Martin in the future.

Just after I had replied, telling him that I felt the same – I should have had to return politeness for politeness, but it happened to be true – young David ran into the room. He was a handsome boy, thin and active, one of those genetic sports who seemed to have no resemblance to either of his parents, olive-skinned. His father looked at him with doting love, and the boy spoke to both of them as though he expected total affection, and gave it back. He was just at the age when the confidence between all three was still complete, with nothing precarious in it, as though the first adolescent storm or secret would never happen. At his school his record was as good as Charles’ had been at the same age, six years before. In some ways, I thought, this boy was the cleverer. It was a triumph for Rosalind, much disapproved of by persons who regarded her as a kind of Becky Sharp, to produce for Azik when she was well over forty a son like this.

As for me, watching (the bonds between the three of them were so strong there wasn’t really room for an outsider there) the happiness of that not specially Holy Family, I couldn’t have found it in me to begrudge it them. But I was thinking of something else. When they had been talking of Muriel, Rosalind had behaved in what Austin Davidson would have called an uncivilised fashion: in fact he would have thought her strident and coarse, and had no use for her. While Azik had been showing all the compassionate virtues.

Well, it was fine to be virtuous, but the truth was, Rosalind minded about her daughter and Azik didn’t. To everyone round them, probably to his wife, possibly even to himself he seemed a good stepfather, affectionate, sympathetic, kind. I had even heard him call himself a Jewish papa, not only in his relation to his son but to his stepdaughter. One had only to see him with that boy, though, to know what he was like as a father – and what he wasn’t to Muriel. Of course he was kind to her, because there weren’t many kinder men. He would do anything practical for her: if she had needed money, he would have been lavish. But as for thinking of her when she was out of his sight, or being troubled about her life, you had just to watch his oneness – animal oneness, spiritual oneness – with his son.

If that had not been so, if his imagination had been working, working father-like, on her behalf, it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t have been more cautious about Pat. At the time (it had happened so quickly, we had all been puzzled that Pat came to know Muriel) I had thought he was taking Pat very easily. Yet Azik was no fool about people. He just wasn’t truly interested, neither in Pat nor in the girl herself. If it had been a business deal, or even more anything concerned with Azik’s son, Pat would never have slid inside the house. As it was, he got away with it: until he discovered, what no one had imagined, that the young woman was more ruthless than he was.

Which began to have other consequences we hadn’t expected. As soon as they knew of Muriel’s resolve, Charles, Maurice and other friends of theirs had been working to bring about a reconciliation. There was a feeling, a kind of age-group solidarity, that Pat had to be helped. He was living in his father’s house in Cambridge; occasionally he came to London, and we heard that he was lent money by some of the young people. Nevertheless, as the summer went on, he was – as it were insensibly – pushed to the edge of their group. One didn’t hear any of them say a harsh word about him: but one ceased to hear him much talked about at all. Whereas Muriel one always saw, when, as occasionally they did, they invited older people to their parties.

Muriel’s own house was modest but smart, the house of a prosperous young married couple, except for the somewhat anomalous absence of a husband. But, instead of entertaining there, she went to the bed-sitting-rooms in which most of that group lived, such as Nina’s in Notting Hill. There seemed to be about a couple of dozen of them drifting round London that summer. Charles, waiting to go up to Cambridge, was the youngest, though some of the others had been at school with him. Young men and girls sometimes called in at our flat for a drink. They were friendly, both with an older generation and each other. They didn’t drink as much as my friends used to at their age: there were all the signs that they took sex much more easily. Certainly there didn’t appear to be many tormented love affairs about. A couple of the girls were daughters of my own friends. I sometimes wondered how much different was the way they lived their lives from their parents’ way: was the gap bigger than other such gaps had been?

Often I was irritated with them as though I were the wrong distance away, half involved, half remote: and it was Charles’ self-control, not mine, which prevented us from quarrelling. He was utterly loyal to his friends and when I criticised them didn’t like it: but he set himself to answer on the plane of reason.

All right, their manners are different from yours: but they think yours are as obsolete as Jane Austen’s. If they don’t write bread-and-butter letters, what of it? It is an absurd convention. If (as once happened) one of them writes on an envelope the unadorned address Lewis Eliot, again what of it?

He wouldn’t get ruffled, and that irked me more. Take your friend Guy Grenfell, I said. They had been at school together. Guy was rich, a member of a squirearchical family established for centuries. He might grow his hair down to his shoulders, but once, when he came to an elderly dinner party, he behaved like the rest of us, and more so. Yet when he was in the middle of their crowd, he appeared to be giving a bad imitation of a barrow boy. Was this to show how progressive he was?

Charles would not let his temper show. Guy was quite enlightened. Some of them were progressive…

I jeered, and threw back at him the record of Lester Ince and his galère. They were just as rude as your friends. Look where they finished. I brought out the old aphorism that when young men rebel against social manners, they end up by not rebelling against anything else.

We shall see, said Charles. Angry that I couldn’t move him, I had let my advocacy go too far: but, still, there were times when, unprovoked, I thought – are these really our successors? Will they ever be able to take over?

Those questions went through my mind when, one day in July, I received the news of George Passant’s death. It had happened weeks before, I was told, very near the time that I had been having that family conference with Azik in Eaton Square. In fact, so far as I could make out the dates, George had had a cerebral haemorrhage the night before, and had died within twenty-four hours. This had taken place in a little Jutland town, where he had exiled himself and was being visited by one of his old disciples. Two or three more of his disciples, faithful to the last, had gone over for the funeral, and they had buried him in a Lutheran cemetery.

It might have seemed strange that it took so long for the news to reach me. After all, he had been my first benefactor and oldest friend. Yet by now be was separated from everyone but his own secret circle in the provincial town: while I, since my father’s death, had no connections in the town any more. There was nothing to take me there, after I resigned from the University Court. It wasn’t my father’s death that cut me off, that was as acceptable as a death could be: but after the trial there were parts of my youth there that weren’t acceptable at all, and this was true for Martin as well as for me. Some of those old scenes – without willing it, by something like a self-protecting instinct – we took care not to see. I still carried out my duty, George’s last legacy, of visiting his niece in Holloway Prison. Occasionally I still had telephone calls, charges reversed, from Mr Pateman, but even his obsessional passion seemed not to have been spent, but at least after a year to be a shade eroded.

So far as I could tell, there had been no announcement of George’s death, certainly not in a London paper. He had been a leader in a strange and private sense, his disciples must be mourning him more than most men are mourned, and yet, except for them, no one knew or cared where he was living, nor whether he was alive or dead.

I heard the news by telephone – a call from the town, would I accept it and reverse the charges? I assumed that it was Mr Pateman, and with my usual worn-down irritation said yes. But it was a different voice, soft, flexible, excited, the voice of Jack Cotery. I had seen him only twice in the past ten years, but I knew that, though he had a job in Burnley, he still visited the town to see his mother, who was living in the same house, the same backstreet, whose existence, when we were young and he was spinning romantic lies about his social grandeur, he had ingeniously – and for some time with success – concealed. Had anyone told me about George, came the eager voice. He, Jack, had just met one of the set. The poor old thing was dead. Jack repeated the dates and such details as he had learned. Until George died, there was someone with him all the time: he knew what was happening, but couldn’t speak.

‘I don’t know what he had to look forward to,’ Jack was saying. ‘But he loved life, in his own way, didn’t he? I don’t suppose he wanted to go.’

To do Jack credit, he would have hurried to tell me the news, even if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. But that he had. The last time he visited me, he had been trying to convert me to organised religion. Now, over the telephone, he couldn’t explain, it was very complicated, but he had another problem, very important, nothing bad, but something that mattered a very great deal – and it was very important, so, just to come out with it, could I lend him a hundred pounds? I said that I would send a cheque that evening, and did so. After what I had been listening to, it seemed like paying a last debt to the past.

Guy Grenfell and other companions of Charles were in the flat, and as I joined them for a drink I mentioned that I had just heard of the death of an old friend. Who, said Charles, and I told him the name. It meant nothing to the others, but Charles had met George year after year, on his ritual expeditions to London. Charles’ eyes searched into my expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But, though he had never told me so – he was too considerate for that – I was certain that in secret he had found George nothing but grotesque. Diffidence. Formality. Heartiness. Repetitive questions (‘Are you looking after your health?’). Flashes of mental precision. Slow-walking, hard-breathing figure, often falling asleep in an armchair, mouth open. Once, coming in drunk, he had fallen off a chair. That was what Charles had seen, and not many at his age would have seen more. He could not begin to comprehend the effect that George had once had on me and my first friends.

The irony was, that the ‘freedoms’ George – and all the other Georges of his time – had clamoured for, had more or less come true. The life that Charles’ own friends were leading was not that much different from what George had foreshadowed all those years ago. A lot of the young men and girls in the Earl’s Court bedsitters would have fitted, breathing native air, into George’s group. Gentle. Taking their pleasures as they came. Not liking their society any more than George had done. Making their own enclaves. The passive virtues, not the fighting ones. Not much superego (if one didn’t use older words). The same belief, deep down, that most people were good.

That would not suit Charles for long, any more than it had suited me. And yet it had its charm. It seemed at times like an Adamic invention, as though no one had discovered a private clan life before. That was true even with the more strenuous natures among them, like his own. It might have been true, I thought, of Muriel.

So much so that when – some weeks after the news about George, to whom I didn’t refer again – I told Charles that his friends went in for enclave-making, just as much as the bourgeois they despised, he didn’t like it. Once more he felt curiously protective about the whole circle, more so than I remembered being. But he was still not prepared to quarrel and he suspected there might be something in what I said. He had also seen more subsistence poverty than any of us. All over the advanced world, people seemed to be making enclaves. I thought that wasn’t just a fantasy of my own. The rich like Azik and some of our American friends; the professionals everywhere; the apparently rebellious young; they were all drawing the curtains, looking inwards into their own rooms, to an extent that hadn’t happened in my time. The demonstrations (that was the summer when the English young, including Charles’ friends, started protesting about Vietnam), the acts of violence, were deceptive. They too came from a kind of enclave. They were part of a world which, though it could be made less comfortable, or more foreboding, no one could find a way to shake.

Charles listened carefully. This wasn’t an argument, though I had touched on the rift of difference between us. Since he had left school and gone on his new-style grand tour, he had been released, happy and expectant. Inside the family, we had no more cares, possibly less, than most of our own kind. It had been an easy summer, with time to meet his friends and our own. Except that we had to be ready for the death of Margaret’s father, we had nothing that seemed likely to disturb us, not even an examination or a book coming out.

‘How many of your prophecies have gone wrong?’ said Charles, without edge, with detachment.

‘Quite a few.’

‘How right were you in the thirties?’

‘Most of the time we (I was thinking of Francis Getliffe and others) weren’t far off. Anyway, a lot of it is on the record.’

‘In the war? What did you think would be happening now?’

I paused.

‘There I should have been wrong. I thought that, if Hitler could be beaten, then things would go much better than in fact they have.’

‘I hope’, said Charles, ‘that you turn out wrong again. After all, some of us might see the end of the century, mightn’t we?’

He gave a smile, meaning that he and his friends by that time would only be middle-aged.

12: Result of an Offer

THE Lords were having a late-night sitting, Francis told me over the telephone (it was the last week in October), a committee stage left over from the summer. He would be grateful if Margaret and I would go along and have supper with him there, just to help him through the hours. Yes, we were free: and it was conceivable that Francis wanted more than sheer company, for one of the political correspondents (not our enemy of the spring) had that morning reported that Lord Getliffe had been called to Downing Street the day before. The same correspondent added with total confidence that S––, the old Commons loyalist who had been given the job when Francis previously refused it, would be going within days. He was being looked after – a nice little pension on one of the nationalised boards.

It sounded like inside information. Just as Hector Rose and my old colleagues used to ask in Whitehall, often with rage, I wondered however it got out. Possibly from S–– himself. Politicians, old Bevill used to say, were the worst keepers of secrets. They will talk to their wives, he added with Polonian wisdom. He might have said, just as accurately, they will talk to journalists: and the habit seemed to be hooking them more every year, like the addiction to a moderately harmless drug.

As we came out of Westminster Underground, the light was shining over Big Ben, there was a smell – foggy? a tinge, or was one imagining it, of burning wood? – in the smoky autumn air. Francis, waiting for us in the peers’ entrance, kissed Margaret and led us up the stairs, over the Jonah’s-whale carpets, straight to the restaurant; we were rescuing him, he said, the parliamentary process could be remarkably boring unless you were brought up to it, man and boy. In fact, he was already occupying a table, one of the first to establish himself, though some men, without guests, were walking through to the inner room. Under the portraits, under the tapestries, taste following the Prince Consort, I noticed one or two faces I vaguely knew, part of a new batch of life peers. Not then, but a little later, when we were settling down to our wine and cold roast beef, there came a face that I more than vaguely knew – Walter Luke, grizzled and jaunty, saying ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Lew,’ as he passed on. It would have been a fair reply that, a short time before, no one would have expected to see him there. But here he was, as though in honour of science – and, because there already existed a Lord Luke, here he was as Lord Luke of Salcombe.

Francis, who had always been fond of Walter Luke, was saying, once he had got out of hearing, that no one we knew had been unluckier, no one of great gifts, that was. If things had gone right, he would have done major scientific work. But all the chances including the war, had run against him. After all of which, said Francis, he got this curious consolation prize.

Yet he had seemed in highish spirits. As the room filled up, no more divisions till half past eight, most people seemed in highish spirits. Greetings, warm room, food, a certain amount of activity ahead, the kind of activity which soothed men like a tranquilliser. For an instant, I recollected my conversation with Charles in the summer. Enclaves. Perhaps it was right, it was certainly natural, for any of us to hack out what refuges we could, some of the time: none of us was tough enough to live every minute in the pitiless air. This was an enclave in excelsis.

As the noise level rose, and no one could overhear, I asked Francis if he had seen the paragraph about him that morning.

‘I was going to tell you about that,’ he said.

‘How true is it?’

‘Not far off.’

I asked: ‘So S— is really going?’

‘To be more accurate, he’s actually gone.’

‘And you?’

‘Of course, I had to say what I did before. I had to tell him I’d made up my mind.’

That was what I expected.

The Prime Minister had been good, said Francis. He hadn’t pressed too much. But after S—, he needed someone with a reputation abroad. Francis added: ‘I think you’d better make up your own mind, pretty quickly.’

After our talk the previous autumn, that also wasn’t entirely unexpected, either to Margaret or me. Despite the attempt to forestall it. There weren’t many of us who had this sort of special knowledge: and even fewer who had used it in public. One could make a list, not more than three or four, of men likely to be asked. It might have sounded arrogant, or even insensitive, for Francis to assume that he was number one on the list, and the rest of us reserves. But it didn’t sound so to Margaret or me. This wasn’t a matter of feeling, about which Francis had been delicate all our lives: it was as objective as a batting order. He was a scientist of international reputation, and the only one in the field. His name carried its own authority with the American and Soviet scientists. That was true of no one else. He would have been a major catch for the Government, which was, of course, why they had come back to him. Now, as he said, they had to fill the job quickly. It would do them some harm if they seemed to be hawking it round.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, dismissing the subject. He was so final that I was puzzled, and to an extent put out. After those hints, it seemed bleak that he should turn quite unforthcoming. I glanced at Margaret and didn’t understand.

Within a short time, however, we were talking intimately again, the three of us. Getting us out of the dining-room early, Francis, with tactical foresight, was able to secure window seats in the bar: there we sat, as the debate continued, the bar became more populated, the division bell rang and Francis left us for five minutes and returned. That went on – the division bell interrupted us twice more – until after midnight, and in the casual hubbub Francis was telling us some family information we hadn’t heard, and asking whether there was any advice he could give his eldest son.

It was one of the oldest of stories. A good many young women might have wondered why Leonard Getliffe hadn’t come their way. He was the most brilliant of the whole Getliffe family, he had as much character as his father, to everyone but one girl he was fun. And that one girl was pleasant, decent but not, to most of us, exciting. He had been in love with her for years. He was in his thirties, but he loved her obsessively, he couldn’t think of other women, in a fashion which seemed to have disappeared from Charles’ circle once they had left school. Whereas she could give him nothing: because she was as completely wrapped up in, of all people, my nephew Pat.

When Pat had deserted her and married Muriel, the girl Vicky (she wasn’t all that young, she must now be twenty-six) had – so Francis now told us – at least not discouraged Leonard from getting in touch with her again. Since I hadn’t visited Vicky and her father since my own father’s death, that was some sort of news, but it was commonplace and natural enough.

‘I must say, of course I’m prejudiced,’ Francis broke out, ‘but I must say that she’s treated him pretty badly.’

Margaret, who knew Vicky and liked her, said yes, but it wasn’t very easy for her – ‘I mean,’ said Francis, ‘she never ought to have done that. Unless she was trying to make a go of it.’

Margaret said, she mightn’t know which way to turn. There were plenty of good women who behaved badly when they were faced with a passion with which they didn’t know how to cope.

‘If I thought she was really trying–’ Then Francis let out something quite new. In the last couple of months, perhaps earlier than that, Pat had been seen with her.

None of the young people had got on to that. Yet, the moment we heard it, it seemed that we ought to have predicted it. Vicky was a doctor, she could earn a living, she would keep him if he needed it. Further, perhaps even Pat wasn’t just calculating on his bed and food: perhaps even he wasn’t infinitely resilient, and after Muriel wanted someone who set him up in his self-esteem again; after all that, he might just want to be loved.

But at that time I wasn’t feeling compassionate about my nephew. Like other persons as quicksilver sympathetic as he could be, as ready to expend himself enhancing life, he had been showing an enthusiasm for revenge just as lively as his enthusiasm for making others cheerful: and he had been searching for revenge against Margaret, feeling, I supposed, that she had done him harm. Anyway he had spread a story which was meant to give Margaret pain. Whether he believed it, or half-believed it, I couldn’t decide. He had one of those imaginations, high-coloured, melodramatic and malicious, that made it easy to believe many things. The story was that, hearing Austin Davidson talk of his ‘sources of supply’, the people who had provided him with drugs to kill himself, Pat had found out their names. They were Maurice and Charles.

To most of us, this bit of gossip wouldn’t matter very much: probably not to the young men themselves. But I knew – it was no use being rational where reason didn’t enter – that it would matter to Margaret. To her it would be something like a betrayal, both by her father and her sons. She would feel that she had lost them all. Maybe Pat also knew what she would feel.

For the time being, I stopped the story from reaching Margaret, which didn’t make me think more kindly of Pat, for it meant both some tiresome staffwork, and also my being less than open with her. So I had to get the truth from Davidson himself before she found out. That, in itself, meant a harsh half-hour. By this time he seemed to be failing from week to week: unless he led the conversation, it was hard to get him to attend. I had to force upon him that this was a family trouble, and might bring suffering for Margaret. He was silent, a long distance from family troubles or his daughter’s pain. For the first time in all those visits, I broke into his silence. He must trust me. He must make an effort. Who had given him the drugs?

At last Davidson said, without interest, that he had made a promise not to tell. That threw me back. I had never known him break a confidence: he wouldn’t change his habit now. After a time, I asked, would he answer two questions in the negative? He gazed at me without expression. Had it been Maurice? With irritation, with something like boredom, Davidson shook his head. Had it been Charles? The same expression, the same shake of the head. (On a later visit, when he was less collected, I was led to infer that the truth was what we might have expected: the ‘source of supply’ had nothing to do with any of the family, but was an old friend and near contemporary of his called Hardisty.)

So that had been settled. Nevertheless, when Francis brought in the name of my nephew, it took some effort to be dispassionate. There were few things I should have liked more that night than to say we could all forget him. There was one thing I should have liked more, and that was to believe that Vicky and Leonard would get married out of hand.

Francis asked us point-blank: ‘Does he stand a chance?’

Margaret and I glanced at each other, and I was obliged to reply, in the angry ungracious tone with which one kills a hope: ‘I doubt it.’

Apparently Leonard, the least expansive of Francis’ children and the one he loved the most, had come to his father with a kind of oblique appeal – ought he to take a job at the Princeton Institute? That wasn’t a professional question; Leonard could name his own job anywhere; he was mutely asking – it made him seem much younger than he was – whether it was all hopeless and he ought at last to get away.

‘You really think that she’ll go back – to that other one?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ She would not only go back, she would run to him, the first time he cricked a finger. Knowing (but also not knowing, as one does in an obsessive love) everything about him. On any terms. She was worth a hundred of Pat, Margaret was saying. On any terms. Nothing would stop her. Would we try to stop her, if we could? It was not for me to talk. I had taken Sheila, my first wife, on terms worse than any this girl would get. I had done wrong to Sheila when I did so: that I had known at the time, and knew now without concealment, after half a lifetime. But if I could have stopped myself, granted absolute free will, should I have done so?

Even now, after half a lifetime, I wasn’t certain. If I had made the other choice, despite the suffering, despite the years of something like maiming, I might have been less reconciled. And that, I thought, could very well prove true for this young woman. If she married Pat (which I regarded as certain, since he wasn’t exactly a spiritual athlete and wouldn’t give up his one patch of safe ground) she would go through all the torments of a marriage without trust. If she didn’t, she would go through another torment, missing – whoever else she married – what she couldn’t help wanting most of all. No, I wouldn’t have stopped her. She might even come out of it better than he did. Sometimes there were ironies on the positive side, one of them being that the faithful were often the more strongly sexed and in the end got the more fun.

It wasn’t often that Francis, who had gone to extreme trouble about our children or Martin’s (in his cheerful patriarchal home he loved to entertain, and it was there, as a bad joke, that Vicky, staying as a guest of Leonard’s, had first met and fallen for Pat), had come for any sort of comfort about his own. But sometimes the kind liked to receive kindness, and he didn’t want us to leave until the house was up.

In the taxi, as it purred up the midnight-smooth tarmac, under the trees to Hyde Park Corner, Margaret was saying, what a bloody mess. That triangle, Vicky, Leonard, Pat. People anything like Pat – even if they were more decent than he was – always did more destruction than anyone else. She broke off: ‘Was Francis sounding you out? Early on. Was he really making you the offer? Had they asked him to?’

No, I said, I didn’t think it would be done like that. ‘Anyway, I hope that doesn’t happen; you know, don’t you?’

That was all she said, before returning to brisk comments upon Pat.

It did happen, and it happened very fast. Late the following night, just as we were thinking it was time for bed, the telephone rang. Private secretary at Downing Street. Apologies, the sharp civil servant’s apologies that I used to hear, from someone whom I used to meet. Could I come along at once? Logistic instructions. I was to be careful not to use the main entrance. Instead, I was to go in through the old Cabinet Offices in Whitehall. There would be an attendant waiting at the door.

It all sounded strangely, and untypically, conspiratorial. Later I recalled what Francis had said about ‘hawking the job round’: they were taking precautions against another visitor being spotted: hence presumably this Muscovite hour, hence the eccentric route. The secretary had asked whether I knew the old office door, next to the Horseguards. Better than he did, it occurred to me, as I went through the labyrinth to the Cabinet room: for it was in the room adjoining the outside door, shabby, coal-fire smoking, that I used to work with old Bevill at the beginning of the war.

I was back again, going past the old offices into Whitehall, within twenty minutes. Time, relaxed time, for the offer and one drink. I had asked, and obtained, forty-eight hours to think it over. Outside, Whitehall was free and empty, as it had been in wartime darkness, when the old minister and I had been staying late and walked out into the street, sometimes exhilarated because we had won a struggle or perhaps because of good news on the scrambled line.

When I opened the door of our drawing-room, Margaret, who was sitting with a book thrown aside, cried out: ‘You haven’t been long!’

Then she asked me, face intent: ‘Well?’

I said, cheerful, buoyed up by the night’s action: ‘It’s exactly what we expected.’

Margaret knew as well as I did the appointment which Francis had turned down: and that this was it.

She said: ‘Yes. I was afraid of that.’

For once, and at once, there was strain between us. She was speaking from a feeling too strong to cover up, which she had to let loose however I was going to take it. She had been preparing herself for the way in which I should take it: if you didn’t quarrel often, quarrels were more dreaded. But even then she couldn’t – and in the end didn’t wish – to hold back.

‘What’s the matter?’ I was put out, more than put out, angry.

‘I don’t want you to make a mistake–’

‘Do you think I’ve decided to take the job?’ I had raised my voice, but hers was quiet, as she replied:

‘Haven’t you?’

It had never been pleasant when we clashed. I didn’t like meeting a will as strong as my own, though hers was formed differently from mine, hers hard and mine tenacious: just as her temper was hot and mine was smouldering. Also I didn’t like being judged – some of my secret vanity had gone by now, but not quite all, the residual and final vanity of not liking to be judged by the one who knew me best.

Just to add an edge to it, I thought that she was misjudging me that night. Not dramatically, only slightly – but still enough. It was true – she had heard me amuse myself at others’ expense as they solemnly professed to wonder whether they should accept a job they had been working towards for years – that most decisions were taken on the spot. When one asked for time to ‘sleep on it’, old Arthur Brown’s immemorial phrase, when one asked for the forty-eight hours’ grace of which I was bad-temperedly telling Margaret – one was, nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, merely enjoying the situation or alternatively searching for rationalisations and glosses to prettify a decision which was already made.

That wasn’t quite the case with me that night. I had in my mind all the reasons why I should say no. So far Margaret was wrong. But only a little wrong. What I wanted was for her to join in dismissing those reasons, take it all lightly, and push me, just a fraction, into saying yes.

Reasons against – they were the same for me as for Francis, and perhaps by this time a shade stronger. He had said that he couldn’t do much – or any – good. I was as convinced of that as he was, whoever did the job: more so because I had lived inside the government apparatus, as he had never done. That hadn’t made me cynical, exactly (for cynicism came only to those who were certain they were superior to less splendid mortals): but it had made me Tolstoyan, or at least sceptical of the effect that any man could have, not just a junior minister, but anyone who really seemed to possess the power, by contrast to the tidal flow in which he lived. Some sort of sense about nuclear armaments might one day arise: what Francis and David Rubin and the rest of us had said, and within our limits done, might not have been entirely useless: but the decisions – the apparent decisions, the voices in cabinets, the signatures on paper – would be taken by people who couldn’t avoid taking them, because they were swept along, unresisting, on the tide. The tide which we had failed to catch.

That wasn’t a reason for not acting. In fact, Francis and his colleagues believed – and so did I – that, in the times through which we had lived, you had to do what little you could in action, if you were to face yourself at all. But it was a reason, this knowledge we had acquired, for not fooling ourselves: for not pretending to take action, when we were one hundred per cent certain that it was just make-believe. If you were only ninety per cent certain, then sometimes you hadn’t to be too proud to do the donkey work. But, if you were utterly certain, then pretending to take action could do harm. It could even drug you into feeling satisfied with yourself.

By this time, our certainties had hardened, that nothing useful could be done in this job. The year before, when Francis was offered it, we thought we had known all about the limits of government. We had flattered ourselves. The limits were tighter than self-styled realistic men had guessed. Azik Schiff couldn’t resist saying that he had warned us about social democracies. Vietnam was hag-riding us. Bitterly Francis said that a country couldn’t be independent in foreign policy if it wasn’t independent in earning its living. That remark had been made in the presence of some of Charles’ friends, and had scandalised them. To many of us, the window of public hope, which had seemed clearer for a few years past, was being blacked out now.

All this was objective, and I didn’t need so much as mention it to Margaret. Nor the other reason against, which was more compelling than with Francis. He had his research to do, and I had my writing. He had the assurance that any good scientist possessed, that some of what he had done was right (it was no use quibbling about epistemological terms; in the here-and-now, in Francis’ own existence that was so). No writer had that assurance: but, exactly as his work was a private comfort, no, more than comfort, justification, so was mine. And – this was a difference between us – I had more to finish than he had, perhaps because I had started later. I had never liked talking about my books, and should never have considered writing anything about my literary life. I had had my joys and sorrows, like any other writer. In fact, most writing lives were more alike than different, which made one’s own not specially interesting, except to oneself. After all, the books were there.

However, quite as much as ever in my life, as much as in the middle of the war, this preoccupation remained with me. It had been steady all through, it hadn’t lost any of its strength. In the middle of the war, I had been a youngish man, I hadn’t the sense of losing against time. I had been too busy to write anything sustained, but I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It had been like going into a safe and quiet room. If I took this job, I could do the same, but I wasn’t youngish now. I should have liked to count on ten years more to work in.

Ten years with good luck. Margaret knew that was what I was hoping for. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about my lifespan. She did say that this would mean time away from writing. Francis, she forced herself to say, had talked about a year or two in office: and he had said that he couldn’t afford a year or two. She didn’t ask a question, she made the statement in a flat, anxious tone, the lines deep across her forehead.

Yes, in every aspect but one, Francis and I were in the same situation, or near enough not to matter. So that the answer should also be the same. There was just one difference. I should like to do the job. I should enjoy it. It was that, precisely that, which Margaret hated.

She had been utterly loyal throughout our married life. She had tried not to constrict me, even when I was doing things, or showing a vein within myself, which she would have liked to wipe away. It wasn’t that she thought that I was an addict of power. If that had been so, she felt that I should have acquired it. And she had learned enough by now to realise that this job I had been offered carried no power at all: and that the more you penetrated that world, the more you wondered who had the power, or whether anyone had, or whether we weren’t giving to offices a free will that those who held them could never conceivably possess.

Nevertheless, she would have liked me to be nowhere near it. Her own principles, her own scrupulousness, couldn’t have lived in that world, any more than her father’s could. She despised, as much as he did, or his friends, the people who got the jobs, who were ready to scramble, compromise, muck in. She couldn’t accept, she resented my accepting, that any society under heaven would need such people. She was put off by my interest, part brotherly, part voyeuristic, in them – in the Lufkins, the Roger Quaifes, even my old civil-service colleagues, who were nearer in sympathy to her. When I told her that they had virtues not given to her father’s friends, or to her, or to me, she didn’t wish to hear.

‘It’s all second-rate,’ she had said before, and said again that night.

Here was I, out of spontaneity (for, though I had trained myself into some sort of prudence, I was still a spontaneous man), or just for the fun or hell of it, ready to plunge in. I should even have enjoyed fighting a by-election: but that wasn’t on, no government with a majority of three could risk it. Anyway, if I said yes, I should enjoy making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords.

To her, who loved me and in many ways admired me – and wanted to admire me totally – it seemed commonplace and vulgar. As our tempers got higher, she used those words.

‘That’s no news to you,’ I said.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘In your sense, I am vulgar.’

‘I won’t have that.’

‘You’ve got to have it. If you mean that I’m not superior to the people round us, then of course I’m vulgar.’

‘I don’t want you to behave like them, that’s all.’

The quarrel went on, and I, because I was not only angry but raw with chagrin (on the way home, I had been expecting a bit of applause, ironic applause maybe: she spoke about temptation, but she might, so I felt, have granted me that this particular temptation didn’t come to all that many men), was having the worst of it. I betrayed myself by bringing up an argument which in my own mind I had already negated: the necessity for action, for any halfway decent man in our own time. I even quoted Hammarskjöld at her, though none of us would have used his words. She looked at me with sad lucidity.

‘You’ve been sincere in that, I know,’ she said. ‘But you’re not being sincere now, are you?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because this isn’t real, as you know perfectly well. It isn’t going to be any use, and if it were anyone else you’d be the first to say so.’

Since that was precisely what in detachment I had thought, I was the more angry with her.

‘Well,’ she said at last, without expression, ‘I take it that you are going to accept.’

I sat sullen, keeping back the words. Then I crossed over to the sideboard and poured myself a drink, the first either of us had had since I returned. Once more I sat opposite to her, and spoke slowly and bitterly (it was a conflict that neither of us had the language for, after twenty years).

I said, that if anything could have made me decide to accept that night, it was her argument against. But she might do me one minor credit: I hadn’t lost all my capacities. It would be better to decide as though she had said nothing whatever. There were serious arguments against, though not hers. I should want some sensible advice, from people who weren’t emotionally committed either way. There I was going to leave it, for that night.

It was already early morning, and we lay in bed, unreconciled.

13: Advice

AS we were being polite to each other at breakfast, I repeated to Margaret that I should have to take some advice. She glanced at me with a glint which, even after a quarrel, wasn’t entirely unsarcastic. One trouble was, I had made too many cracks about others: how many times had she listened to me saying that persons in search of advisers had a singular gift for choosing the right ones? That is, those who would produce the advice they wanted to hear.

No, I said, as though brushing off a comment, I thought of calling on old Hector Rose. He knew this entire field of government backwards: he was a friendly acquaintance, not even specially well disposed: he would keep the confidence, and was as cool as a man could reasonably be.

Margaret hadn’t expected that name. She gave a faint grin against herself. All she could say was that he would be so perfectly balanced that I might as well toss up for it.

When I telephoned Hector at the Pimlico flat, his greetings were ornate. Pleasure at hearing my voice! Surprise that I should think of him! Cutting through the ceremonial, I asked if he were free that morning: there was a matter on which I should like his opinion. Of course, came the beautiful articulation, he was at my disposal: not that any opinion of his could be of the slightest value –

He continued in that strain, as soon as I arrived in their sitting-room. He was apologising for his wife and himself, because she wasn’t there to receive me, to her great disappointment, but in fact she had to go out to do the morning’s shopping. As so often in the past, facing him in the office, I felt like an ambassador to a country whose protocol I had never been properly taught or where some customs had just been specially invented in order to baffle me. I said: ‘What I’ve come about – it’s very private.’

He bowed from the waist: ‘My dear Lewis.’

‘I want a bit of guidance.’

Protestations of being at my service, of total incompetence and humility. At the first pause I said that it was a pleasant morning (the porticoes opposite were glowing in the autumn sunshine): what about walking down to the garden by the river? What a splendid idea, replied Hector Rose with inordinate enthusiasm – but first he must write a note in case his wife returned and became anxious. Standing by my side, he set to work in that legible italic calligraphy. I could not help seeing, I was meant to see.

Darling, I have gone out for a short stroll with Sir L Eliot (the old Whitehall usage which he had inscribed on his minutes, often, when we were disagreeing, with irritation). I shall, needless to say, be back with you in good time for luncheon. Abiding love. Your H.

It was so mellow out of doors, leaves spiralling placidly down in calm air, that Hector did not take an overcoat. He was wearing a sports coat and grey flannel trousers, as he might have done as an undergraduate at Oxford in the twenties. Now that we were walking together, it occurred to me that he was shorter than he had seemed in his days of eminence: his stocky shoulders were two or three inches below mine. He was making conversation, as though it were not yet suitable to get down to business: his wife and he had been to a concert the night before: they had an agreement, he found it delectable to expatiate on their domestic ritual, to get out of the flat two evenings a week. The danger was, they had both realised when they married – Hector reported this ominous fact with earnestness – that they might tend to live too much in each other’s pockets.

It was like waiting for a negotiation to begin.

When we turned down by the church, along the side of the square towards the river, I jerked my finger towards one of the houses. ‘I lived there during the war,’ I said. ‘When I was working for you.’

‘How very remarkable! That really is most interesting!’ Hector, looking back, asked exactly where my flat had been, giving a display of excitement that might have been appropriate if I had shown him the birthplace of Einstein.

We arrived at the river wall. The water was oily smooth in the sun, the tide high. There was the sweet and rotting smell that I used to know, when Margaret and I stood there in the evenings, not long after we first met.

On one of the garden benches an elderly man in a straw hat was busy transcribing some figures from a book. Another bench was empty, and Hector Rose said: ‘I’m inclined to think it’s almost warm enough to sit down, or am I wrong, Lewis?’

Yes, it was just like one of his negotiations. You didn’t press for time and in due course the right time came. The official life was a marathon, not a sprint, and one stood it better if one took it at that tempo. People who were impatient, like me, either didn’t fit in or had to discipline themselves.

Now it was time, as Hector punctiliously brushed yellow leaves from off the seat, and turned towards me. I told him of the job – there was no need to mention secrecy again, or give any sort of explanation – and said, as usual curt because he wasn’t, what about it?

‘I should be obliged if you’d give me one or two details,’ said Hector. ‘Not that they are likely to affect the issue. But of course I am quite remarkably out of things. Which department would this “supernumerary minister” be attached to?’ The same as S––, I said. Attentively Hector inclined his head. ‘As you know, I always found the arrangements that the last lot (the previous government) made somewhat difficult to justify in terms of reason. And I can’t help thinking that, with great respect, your friends are even worse, if it is possible, in that respect.’

‘This minister’ would have a small private office, and otherwise would have to rely on the department? A floating, personal appointment? ‘Not that that is really relevant, of course.’

He was frowning with concentration, there was scarcely a hesitation. He looked at me, eyes unblinking, arms folded on his chest. He said: ‘It’s very simple. You’re not to touch it.’

When he came to the point, Hector, who used so many words, liked to use few. But he didn’t often use so few as this.

Jolted, disappointed (more than I had allowed for), I said, that was pretty definite, what was he thinking of?

‘You’re not immortal,’ said Hector, in the same bleak, ungiving tone. ‘You ought to remember that.’

We gazed at each other in silence.

He added: ‘Granted that no doubt unfortunate fact, you have better things to do.’

He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say anything more emollient. He would neither expand his case, nor withdraw. We had never been friendly, and yet perhaps that morning he would have liked to be. Instead, he broke off and remarked, with excessive pleasure, what a beautiful morning it was. Had I ever seen London look so peaceful? And what a kind thought it was for me to visit a broken-down civil servant! As usual with Hector’s flights of rhapsody and politeness, this was turning into a curious exercise of jeering at himself and me.

There was nothing for it. Very soon I rose from the bench – the old man in the straw hat was still engrossed in esoteric scholarship – and said that I would walk back with Hector to his flat. He continued with mellifluous thanks, apologies, compliments and hopes for our future meetings. The functional part of the conversation had occupied about five minutes, the preamble half an hour, the coda not quite so long.

When I returned home, Margaret, who was sitting by the open window, looking over the glimmering trees, said: ‘Well, you saw him, did you?’

Yes, I replied.

‘He wouldn’t commit himself, would he?’

No, I said, she hadn’t been quite right. He hadn’t been specially non-committal.

‘What did he think?’

‘He was against it.’

I didn’t tell her quite how inflexibly so, though I was trying to be honest. Then the next person I turned to for advice didn’t surprise her. This was what she had anticipated earlier in the morning. It was my brother Martin, and I knew, and she knew that I knew, on which side he was likely to come down. That proved to be true, as soon as I got on the line to Cambridge. Why not have a go? I needn’t do it for long. It would be a mildly picturesque end to my official career. Martin, the one of us who had made a clear-cut worldly sacrifice, kept – despite or because of that – a relish for the world. He also kept an eye on practical things. Had I reckoned out how much money I should lose if I went in? The drop in income would be dramatic: no doubt I could stand it for a finite time. Further – Martin’s voice sounded thoughtful, sympathetic – couldn’t I bargain for a slightly better job? They could upgrade this one, it was a joker appointment anyway, ministers of state were a fairly lowly form of life, that wasn’t quite good enough, he was surprised they hadn’t wanted Francis or me at a higher level. Still –

Margaret, who had been listening, asked, not innocently, whether those two, Hector Rose and Martin, cancelled each other out. I was as non-committal as she expected Rose to be, but to myself I thought that my mind was making itself up. Then, not long afterwards, we were disturbed again. A telephone call. A government backbencher called Whitman. Not precisely a friend, but someone we met at parties.

‘What’s all this I hear?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied.

‘Come on. You’re being played for, you know you are.’

‘I don’t understand–’

‘Now, now, of course you do.’

In fact, I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t understand where his information came from. Was it an intelligent bluff? The only people who should have known about this offer were the private office, Margaret, Hector Rose, Martin. They were all as discreet as security officers. I had the feeling, at the same time euphoric and mildly paranoid, of living at the centre of a plot, microphones in the sitting-room, telephones tapped.

More leading questions, more passive denials and stonewalling at my end.

‘You haven’t given your answer already, have you?’

‘What is there to give an answer to?’

‘Before you do, I wish you’d have dinner with me. Tonight, can you make it?’

He was badgering me like an intimate, and he had no claim to. I said that I had nothing to tell him. He persisted: ‘Anyway, do have dinner with me.’ Out of nothing better than curiosity, and a kind of excitement, I said that I would come.

I duly arrived at his club, a military club, at half past seven, and Whitman was waiting in the hall. He was a spectacularly handsome man, black-haired, lustrous-eyed, built like an American quarterback. He had won a Labour seat in 1955 and held it since, something of a sport on those backbenches. A Philippe Égalité radical, his enemies called him. He had inherited money and had never had a career outside politics, though in the war he had done well in a smart regiment.

‘The first thing’, he said, welcoming me with arms spread open, ‘is to give you a drink.’

He did give me a drink, a very large whisky, in the club bar. Loosening my tongue, perhaps – but he was convivial, expansive and not over-abstinent himself. Nevertheless, expansive as he was, he didn’t make any reference to his telephonic attack: this evening had been mapped out, and, like other evenings with a purpose, the temperature was a little above normal. More drinks for us both. He was calling me by my Christian name, but that was as common in Westminster as in the theatre. I had to use his own, which was, not very appropriately, Dolfie.

Gossip. His colleagues. The latest story about a senior minister. A question about Francis Getliffe. The first lead-in? Dolfie in the Commons had, as one of his specialities, military affairs. We moved in to dinner, which he had chosen in advance. Pheasant, a decanter of claret already on the table. An evening with a purpose, all right, but he was also a man who enjoyed entertaining. More chat. We had finished the soup, we were eating away at the pheasant, the decanter was getting low, when he said: ‘By the way, are you going into the Government, Lewis?’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you do seem to be better informed than I am.’

‘I have my spies.’ He was easy, undeterred, eyes shining, like a man’s forcing a comrade to disclose good news.

‘You don’t always trust what they tell you, do you?’

‘A lot of people are sure that you’re hesitating, you know–’

‘I really should like to know how they get that curious impression. And I should like to know who these people are.’

His smile had become sharper.

‘I don’t want to embarrass you, Lewis. Of course I don’t–’

‘Never mind about that. But this isn’t very profitable, is it?’

‘Still, you could tell me one thing, couldn’t you? If you’ve accepted today, it will be in the papers tomorrow. So you won’t be giving anything away.’

I was on the edge of saying, this discussion would get nowhere, it might as well stop. But I could keep up my end as long as he could, one didn’t mind (not to be hypocritical, it was warming) being the object of such attention. Further, I was getting interested in his motives.

‘I don’t mind telling you’, I said, ‘that there will be nothing in the papers tomorrow. But that means nothing at all.’

‘Doesn’t it mean you have had an offer?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Anyway, you haven’t accepted today?’

‘I’ve accepted nothing. That’s very easy, unless you’ve got something to accept.’

Whether he had listened to the qualification, I was doubtful. His face was lit up, as though he were obscurely triumphant. With an effort, an effort that suddenly made him seem nervous and overeager, he interrupted the conversation as we took our cheese. More chat, all political. When would the next election be? The Government couldn’t go on long with this majority. With any luck, they’d come back safe for five years. Probably ten, he said, with vocational optimism. His own seat was dead secure, he didn’t need to worry about that.

It was not until we had gone away from the dining-room, and had drunk our first glasses of port in the library, that he began again, persuasive, fluent, with the air of extreme relief of one getting back to the job.

‘If it isn’t boring about what we were saying at dinner–’

‘I don’t think we shall get any further, you know.’ I was still cheerful, still curious.

‘Assuming that an offer – well, I don’t want to make things difficult’ (he gave a flashing, vigilant smile) – ‘assuming that an offer may come your way–’

‘I don’t see much point, you know, in assuming that.’

‘Just for the sake of argument. Because there’s something I want to tell you. Very seriously. I hope you realise that I admire you. Of course, you’re an older man than I am. You know a great deal more. But I happen to be on my own home ground over this. You see, you’ve never been in Parliament and I have. So I don’t believe I’m being impertinent in telling you what I think. You see, I know what would be thought if anyone like you – you, Lewis – went into the Government.’

He was speaking now with intensity.

‘It wouldn’t do you any good. Anyone who admired you would have to tell you to think twice. If they were worried about your own best interests.’

He said: ‘It’s a mistake for anyone to go into politics from the outside. It’s a mistake for anyone to take a job in the Government unless he’s in politics already. A job that people in the Commons would like to have themselves. I beg you to think of that.’

Yes, I was thinking about that, with a certain well-being, as I left him for a moment in order to go to the lavatory. As usual, as with a good many warnings, even when they were least disinterested, there was truth in what he said. And yet, in a comfortable mood, enhanced by Whitman’s excitement and the alcohol, I felt it would be agreeable – if only I were dithering on the edge – not to be frightened off. There was a pleasure, singularly unlofty, in being passionately advised not to take a job which one’s adviser wanted for himself. As, of course, Whitman wanted this. Not that I had heard him mentioned. On the contrary, the gossip was that he was too rich, and too fond of the smart life, to be acceptable to his own party.

On the way back from the lavatory, those thoughts still drifting amiably through my mind, I saw the back of someone I believed I recognised, moving very slowly, erect, but with an interval between each step, towards the lift. I caught him up, and found that, as I had thought, it was Sammikins. But his face was so gaunt, his eyes so sunk and glittering, that I was horrified. Horrified out of control, so that I burst out: ‘What is the matter?’

He let out a kind of diminuendo of his old brazen laugh. His voice was weak but unyielding, as he said: ‘Inoperable cancer, dear boy.’

I couldn’t have disentangled my feelings, it was all so brusque, they fought with each other. Affronted admiration for that special form of courage: sheer visceral concern which one would have felt for anyone, sharpened because it was someone of whom I was fond: yes (it wouldn’t hide itself, any more than a stab of envy could), something like reproach that this apparition should break into the evening. Up to now I had been enjoying myself, I had been walking back with content, with streaks of exhilaration: and then I saw Sammikins, and heard his reply.

Could I do anything, I said unavailingly. ‘You might give me an arm to the lift,’ he said. ‘It seems a long way, you know.’ As I helped him, I asked why I hadn’t been told before. ‘Oh, it’s not of great interest,’ said Sammikins. The irritating thing was, he added, that all his life he had drunk too much: now the doctors were encouraging him to drink, and he couldn’t manage it.

I was glad to see the lift door shut, and a vestigial wave of the hand. When I returned to the library, Whitman, who was not insensitive, looked at me and asked if something had gone wrong.

An old friend was mortally ill, I said. I had only heard in the last few minutes.

‘I’m very sorry about that,’ said Whitman. ‘Anyone close?’

‘No, not very close.’

‘Ah well, it will happen to us all,’ said Whitman, taking with resignation, as we had all done, the sufferings of another.

He ordered more drinks, and, his ego reasserting itself, got back to his plea, his warning, his purpose. Politics (he meant, the profession of politics) was a closed shop, he insisted, his full vigour and eloquence flowing back. Perhaps it was more of a closed shop than anything in the country. You had to be in it all your life, if you were going to get a square deal. Any outsider was bound to be unpopular. I shouldn’t be being fair to myself unless I realised that. That was why he had felt obliged to warn me, in my own best interests.

I found myself sinking back into comfort again, my own ego asserting itself in turn. There were instants when I was reminded of Sammikins, alone in a club bedroom upstairs. Once I thought that he too, not so long ago, had been hypnotised by the ‘charm of politics’, just as much as this man Whitman was. The charm, the say-so, the flah-flah, the trappings. It made life shine for them, simply by being in what they felt was the centre of things.

Yet soon I was enjoying the present moment. It began to seem necessary to go on to the attack: Whitman ought to be given something to puzzle him. So I expressed gratitude for his action. This was an exceptionally friendly and unselfish act, I told him. But – weren’t there two ways of looking at it? In the event, the unlikely event, of my ever having to make this choice, then of course I should have to take account of all these warnings. I was certain, I assured him, that he was right. But mightn’t it be cowardly to be put off? In that way, I didn’t think I was specially cowardly. Unpopularity, one learned to live with it. I had had some in my time. One also had to think of (it was time Whitman was properly mystified) duty.

No, Whitman was inclined to persuade me that this was not my duty. He would have liked me to stay longer: there were several points he hadn’t thoroughly explained. He gazed at me with impressive sincerity, but as though wondering whether he could have misjudged me. As he saw me into a taxi, he might have been, so it seemed, less certain of my intentions than when the evening began.

14: End of a Line

ON the Friday morning I said to Margaret that the forty-eight hours would be up that night, and I should have to give my answer.

‘Do you know what it’s going to be?’

‘Yes,’ I said, in a bad and brooding temper.

She was not sure. She had seen these moods of vacillation before now. Perhaps she had perceived that I was in the kind of temper that came when one was faced by a temptation: saw that it had to be resisted: and saw, at the same time, that if one fell for it one would feel both guilty and liberated. But we were not in a state for that kind of confidence. I was still resentful because she had been so positive, still wishing that I could act in what the existentialists called my freedom. The only comment that I could take clinically had been Hector Rose’s: Hector had his share of corrupt humanity, but not in his judgment: and this was a time when corrupt humanity got in the way. He was, of course – as in lucid flashes I knew as well as he did – dead right.

Yet still, though I had made up my mind, I acted as though I hadn’t. Or as though I were waiting for some excuse or change of fortune to blow my way. I took it for granted that Margaret couldn’t alter her view, much as she might have liked to, for the sake of happiness.

The only time when we were at one came as I told her about Sammikins. She too had an affection for him, like mine mixed up – this was long before his illness – of respect, pity, mystification. He had virtue in the oldest sense of all: in any conceivable fashion, he was one of the bravest of men. And his gallantry, from the time we had first met him, in former days at Basset, had been infectious. Since when we had learned more, through some of our police acquaintances, about his underground existence. Pick-ups in public lavatories, quite promiscuous, as reckless in escalating risks as he was in war. He had been lucky, so they said, to keep out of the courts. Sometimes, without his knowing it, his friends, plus money and influence, had protected him. When he came into the title, he hadn’t become more cautious but had – like George Passant chasing another kind of sensation – doubled his bets.

‘What a waste,’ said Margaret. Strangely enough, before he was ill, he might in his strident voice have said that of himself but not so warmly.

When we had ceased to talk of Sammikins, I became more restless. I went into the study and started to write the letter of refusal which I could as well have drafted on the Wednesday night. But I left it unfinished, staring out over the park, making a telephone call that didn’t matter. Then I went and found Margaret: it might be a good idea if I went to Cambridge for the night, I said.

Temper still not steady, I asked her to call Francis at his laboratory. I was showing her that it was all innocent. While she was close by, I was already talking to Francis – I should like to stay in college that night, no, I didn’t want to bother him or Martin, in fact I should rather like to stay in college by myself. Perhaps he would book the guest room? Francis offered to dine in hall – yes, if it wasn’t a nuisance. No, don’t trouble to send word round to Martin, I shall see him soon anyway. Nor old Arthur Brown, this wasn’t a special occasion. But young Charles – if he would drop in my room soon after hall? Francis would get a message round to Trinity. ‘There,’ I said to Margaret. ‘That ought to be peaceful enough.’

Autumn afternoon. The stations paced by: the level fields, the sun setting in cocoons of mist. From the taxi, the jangled Friday traffic, more shops, brighter windows, than there used to be. When I entered the college, the porter on duty produced my name with a question mark, ready with the key, but not recognising me by sight.

As I crossed the court, I recalled that, when I was first there, at this time of year there would have been leaves of Virginia creeper, wide red leaves, squelching on the cobbles and clinging like oriflammes to the walls. Since then the college had been cleaned, and these first court walls were bare, no longer grey but ochre-bright, looking as they might have done, not when the court was built (there had been two facades since then), but in the eighteenth century.

That was a change. But it made no difference to the curious tang that the court gave one in October, quite independent of one’s deeper moods, springy, pungent, a shade wistful. Was that climatic, or was it because the academic year had the perverse habit of beginning in the autumn? Anyhow, it had been pleasurable when I lived there, and was so visiting the place that night.

The guest room lay immediately under my old sitting-room, and it was up the stairs outside that callers used to climb, as light-footed as Roy Calvert, or ponderous as Arthur Brown, during various bits of college drama. Not that I thought twice, or even once, about that. It was fairly early in the evening, but I had some letter-writing to do. It was already too late to get a written answer to the private office by the time I had promised: but all day I had been half muddling through, half planning that I could telephone the secretary (that is, the principal private secretary) in time enough, and have the letter reach him tomorrow.

I waited till seven o’clock before I called on Francis. The first hall-sitting was noisy, rattle of plates, young men’s voices, the heavy smell of food, as I pushed through the screens. In the second court, the seventeenth-century building stood out clean-lined under a fine specimen of a hunter’s moon, rising over the acacia. Francis’ lights were shining, from rooms which in my time had been the Dean’s. But, now Francis had stripped off the hearty decorations, they were handsome to look at as soon as one stepped inside, moulded panelling, Dutch tiles round the fireplace. Francis gave me a friendly cheek-creased smile, and then, absent-mindedly, as though I were an undergraduate, offered me a glass of sherry. When I said that, except in Cambridge, I didn’t touch that dispiriting drink once a year, Francis’ smile got deeper; but he wasn’t surprised, he was waiting for it, to hear me continue without any break at all.

‘I’ve got the offer of your job, you know,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘I was given a pretty firm hint about that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything on Tuesday night.’

We were sitting on the opposite sides of the fireplace. Francis looked at me, eyes lit up over the umber pouches (misleading perhaps, that anyone now so content should carry indelibly all those records of strain) and asked:

‘Well, what about it?’

I hesitated before I replied. Then I said: ‘I’m inclined to think that I ought to give the same answer as you did.’

‘I don’t want to persuade you either way. I just don’t know which is better for you.’

He was speaking with affectionate, oddly gentle, concern. Maybe I had expected, or hoped, even with the letter written, that he would say something different. But I should have known. When he had seemed curt or uninterested in the Lords bar, that was nothing like the truth. He cared a good deal for what happened to me. On the other hand, or really on the same hand, he was too fine-nerved to intrude – unless he was sure that he was discriminating right. Only once or twice in the whole of our lives had he intervened into my private choices. On politics, of course he had. On pieces of external behaviour, yes. But almost never when it would affect my future. The only time I could bring back to mind that night was when he told me, diffidently but exerting all his strength, that whatever the cost and guilt I ought, after Margaret and I had parted and she had married someone else, to get her back and marry her myself.

None of my friends, certainly no one I had known intimately, was as free from personal imperialism as Francis. He didn’t wish to dominate others’ lives, nor even to insinuate himself into them. Sometimes, when we were younger, it had made him seem – side by side with the personal imperialists – to lack their warmth. As they occupied themselves with others, the imperialists were warm for their own benefit. In the same kind of relation, Francis, within the human limits, wasn’t concerned with his own benefit. That was a reason why, after knowing him for a lifetime, one found he wore so well.

‘I think I probably ought to turn it down.’ I still said it as something like a question.

‘I just don’t know for you.’ Francis shook his head. ‘I dare say you’re being sensible.’

A little later, he observed, with amiable malice: ‘Whatever you do, you’ll be extremely cross with yourself for not doing the opposite, won’t you?’

Soon we left it. We could have retraced the arguments, but there was nothing more to say. The quarter chimed from one of the churches beyond the Fellows’ Garden. Francis, opening a cupboard to pick up his gown, said: ‘By the by, the Master’s dining tonight. You can’t say I don’t sacrifice myself for you.’

This was the third Master since Francis was an undergraduate, a man called O S Clark. Francis detested him, and even Martin took his name off the dining list when he found the Master’s on it. Clark was a man of the ultra-right (the present gibe was that he monitored all BBC programmes marking down the names of left-wing speakers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury), and he and his supporters had taken over the college government, so that Martin, as Senior Tutor, was left without power and on his own.

The college bell began to ring, undergraduates were running along the paths, Francis and I walked to the combination room. It was already full, men, most of them young, pushing round the table, panel lights glowing over their heads. When I was a fellow, there had been fourteen of us; now, in 1965, the number was over forty; more often than not, they told me the high table overflowed. Before the butler summoned us into hall, the Master welcomed Francis and me with simple cordiality. ‘We don’t often have the pleasure,’ he said. He had been a cripple since infancy, and had a fresh pink-skinned juvenile face as though affliction, instead of ageing him, had preserved his youth. His smile gave an impression both of sweet nature and obstinacy. Martin and Francis had certain comments to make about the sweet nature. Everyone agreed that he was a strong character, so much so that, although he dragged his useless leg about, no one thought of him as a cripple, or ever pitied him.

By his side stood his chief confidant, an old enemy of mine, the ex-bursar, Nightingale. To my surprise, he insisted on shaking me strongly by the hand.

In fact, the forms were being preserved. As soon as grace was ended and we settled down at high table, at our end, the senior end, conversation proceeded rather as though at an international conference with someone shouting ‘restricted’ when a controversial point emerged. The immemorial college topics took over, bird-watching, putative new buildings, topics in which my interest had always been minimal and was now nil. I turned to my left and talked to a young fellow, whose subject turned out to be molecular biology. He seemed very clever: I suspected that, when he heard the name of one bird trumping another, when he listened to that beautiful display of non-hostility, he was amused. With him and his contemporaries, so Francis and others told me, there was a change. A change for the better, said Francis. These young men were much more genuine academics than their predecessors: most of them were doing good research. They mightn’t be such picturesque examples of free personality as those I used to sit with; but a college, Francis baited me, didn’t exist to be a hothouse of personality. These young men were high-class professionals. I should have liked to know what they thought of relics of less exacting days.

When we arrived back in the combination room, Francis asked me if I wanted to stay for wine. No, I said, the young men were hurrying off; and anyway Charles would presumably be calling at the guest room soon. With a nod, not devoid of relief, Francis led me out into the first court. He said: ‘What was all that in aid of?’

He meant, why had I wanted to dine in hall. I couldn’t have given a coherent answer: it wasn’t sentiment, it had something to do with the confusion of that day.

Francis asked me to let him know when the decision was made.

‘Oh, it is made,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said Francis, and added that he had better leave me alone with Charles. ‘He won’t give you any false comfort.’ Francis broke into an experienced paternal grin before he said good night.

A hard rap at the guest room, Charles punctual but interrogatory. ‘Hallo?’

I thought that he felt he was being inspected: it was his first term, and though he had made himself a free agent so early he was cagey about being visited or disturbed.

‘This is nothing to do with you, Carlo,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s entirely about me. I wanted to tell you the news myself.’

‘What have you been doing now?’

‘Nothing very sensational. But I’ve just sent off a letter.’

He was watching me, half-smiling.

‘Refusing a job’, I went on, ‘in the Government.’

‘Have you, by God?’ Charles broke out.

I explained, I should have to make a telephone call later that evening. They wanted to receive an answer that night, and the letter would confirm it. But Charles was not preoccupied with administrative machinery. Of course – he was brooding in an affectionate, reflective manner – it had always been on the cards, hadn’t it? Yes, it could have been different if I had been an American or a Russian, then perhaps I might have been able to do something.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘it isn’t every day that one declines even this sort of job, I suppose.’

He said it protectively, with a trace of mockery, a touch of admiration. He was still protective about my affairs, bitter if he saw me criticised. And he also felt a little envy, such as entered between a father and son like us. But, when I envied him, it was a make-believe and a pleasure: when he envied me, there was an edge to it. I had, for better or worse, done certain things, and he had them all to do.

‘I’m rather surprised you did decline, you know,’ said Charles. ‘You’ve chanced your arm so many times, haven’t you?’

There was the flash of envy, but his spirits were high, his eyes glinting with empathetic glee.

‘I’ve always thought that was because you didn’t have the inestimable privilege of attending one of our famous boarding schools,’ he said. ‘There’s precisely one quality you can’t help acquiring if you’re going to survive in those institutions. I should call it a kind of hard cautiousness. Well, you didn’t have to acquire that when you were young, now did you? And I don’t believe it’s ever come natural to you.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

So he was, though very few people would have thought so.

I was thinking, when he was looking after his friends, or even me, he could show much sympathy. When he was chasing one of his own desires, he was so intense that he could be cruel. That wasn’t simply one of the contradictions of his age. I expected that he would have to live with it. That evening, though, he was at his kindest.

‘So I should have guessed that you’d plunge in this time,’ he said, with a cheerful sarcastic flick. ‘And you didn’t. Still capable of surprising us, aren’t you?’

‘That wasn’t really the chief reason,’ I played the sarcasm back.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ he cried, by way of applause. ‘Anyway, not many people ever have the chance to say no. I’m going to stand you a drink on it.’

We went out of the college and slipped up Petty Cury towards the Red Lion, just as before the war – especially in that autumn when the election of the Master was coming close and we didn’t want to be traceable in our rooms – Roy Calvert and I used to do. Neither Charles, nor undergraduates whom he called to in the street, were wearing gowns, as once they would have been obliged to after dusk: but they were wearing a uniform of their own, corduroy jackets and jeans, the lineal descendants of Hector Rose’s morning attire, that reminder of his youth.

While I sat in the long hall of the pub, Charles rejoined me, carrying two tankards of beer. He stretched out his legs on one side of our table, and said: ‘Well, here’s to your abdication.’

I was feeling celebratory, expansive and at the same time (which didn’t often happen in Cambridge) not unpleasantly nostalgic. It was a long time since I had had a drink inside that place. It seemed strange to be there with this other young man, not so elegant as Roy Calvert, nothing like so manic, and yet with wits which weren’t so unlike: with this young man, who, by a curious fluke, had that year become some kind of intimate – in a relation, as well as a circle, mysterious to me – of Roy Calvert’s daughter.

After a swallow of beer, Charles, also expansive, though he had nothing to be nostalgic about, said: ‘Daddy’ (when had he last called me that?), ‘I take it this is the end of one line for you, it must be.’

‘Yes, of course it must.’

‘It never was a very central line, though, was it?’

I was trying to be detached. Living in our time, I said, you couldn’t help being concerned with politics – unless you were less sentient than a human being could reasonably be. In the thirties people such as Francis Getliffe and I had been involved as one might have been in one’s own illness: and from then on we had picked up bits of knowledge, bits of responsibility, which we couldn’t easily shrug off.

But that wasn’t quite the whole story, at least for me. It wasn’t as free from self. I had always had something more than an interest, less than a passion, in politics. I had been less addicted than Charles himself, I said straight to the attentive face. And yet, one’s life isn’t all a chance, there’s often a secret planner putting one where one has, even without admitting it, a slightly shamefaced inclination to be. So I had found myself, as it were absent-mindedly, somewhere near – sometimes on the fringe, sometimes closer in – a good deal of politics.

When had it all started? This was the end of a line all right. Perhaps one could name a beginning, the night I clinched a gamble, totally unjustified, and decided to read for the Bar. That gave me my chance to live among various kinds of political men – industrial politicians, from my observer’s position beside Paul Lufkin, academic politicians in the college (as in that election year 1937, fresh in my mind tonight), and finally the administrators and the national politicians, those who seemed to others, and sometimes to themselves, to possess what men thought of as power.

Charles knew all that. He thought, if he had had the same experience, he would have gone through it with as much interest. But he didn’t want to discuss that theme in my biography, now being dismissed for good and all. He was occupied, as I went to fetch two more pints, with what lessons he could learn. We had talked about it often, just as on the night he returned home in the summer. Not as father and son, but as colleagues, fellow students, or perhaps people who shared a taste in common. Many of our tastes were different, but here we were, and had been since he grew up, very near together.

Closed politics. Open politics. That was a distinction we had spoken of before, and stretched out in gawky relaxation Charles came back to it that night. Closed politics. The politics of small groups, where person acted upon person. You saw it in any place where people were in action, committees of sports clubs, cabinets, colleges, the White House, boards of companies, dramatic societies. You saw it perhaps at something like its purest (just because the society answered to no one but itself, lived like an island) in the college in my time. But it must be much the same in somewhat more prepotent groups, such as the Vatican or the Politburo.

‘I fancy’, said Charles, ‘you’ve known as much about it as anyone will need to know.’

That was said very simply, as a compliment. He was right, I thought, in judging that the subject wasn’t infinite: the permutations of people acting in closed societies were quite limited, and there wasn’t all that much to discover. But I also thought that he might be wrong, if he guessed that closed politics were becoming less significant. I might have guessed the same thing at his age – that wasn’t patronising, some of his insights were sharper than mine – but it would have been flat wrong. For some reason about which none of us was clear, partly perhaps because all social processes had become, not only larger, but much more articulated, closed politics in my lifetime had become, not less influential, but much more so. And this had passed into the climate of the day. Many more people had become half-interested in, half-apprehensive about, power groups, secret decisions. There were more attempts to understand them than in my youth. It was only by a quirk of temperament, and a lot of chance, that I had spent some time upon them, I told Charles: but, just for once, he could take me as a kind of weathervane.

Yes, he granted me that: and where did we go from there?

As we left the Lion, and walked through the market place, he began to speak freely, the words not edged or chosen, but coming out with passion. The real hope was open politics. It must be. If any of his generation – anywhere – could make open politics real again.

Yes, the machinery mattered, of course it mattered, only a fool ignored it – but there was everything to do. It just wasn’t enough to ward off nuclear war or even to feed the hungry world. That was necessary but not sufficient. People in the West were crying out for something more.

Although it was after ten when we reached Trinity, the gate stood open (Charles, unlike me, had not seen it closed at that time of night) and two girls were entering in front of us. The Great Court spread out splendid in the high moonlight: as we passed the sundial, its shadow was black-etched on the turf: Charles was oblivious to the brilliant night or to any other vista. Hadn’t one of my old friends, he was asking, once said that literature, to be any good, had to give some intimation of a desirable life? Well, so had politics. Far more imperatively. That was what the advanced world, the industrialised world, the whole of the West was waiting for. Someone had to try. Someone who understood the industrialised world: that was there for keeps. Someone who started there. A Lenin of the affluent society. Someone who could make its life seem worth while.

‘It may not be possible,’ said Charles, after we climbed the stairs to his room, his fervour leaving him. ‘Perhaps it never will be possible. But someone has to try.’

I glanced out of his window, which looked over the old bowling green, neatly bisected, light and dark, by a shadow under the moon. Not wanting to break the current (I hadn’t often heard him so emotional, in the old non-Marxist sense so idealistic), I asked if this was what, when some of his contemporaries were protesting, they were hoping to say or bring about.

‘Oh that. Some of them know what they’re doing. Some are about as relevant as the Children’s Crusade.’

If they had been listening to his tone, which was no longer emotional, I couldn’t help thinking that certain contemporaries referred to would not have been too pleased.

‘Mind you, I shall go out on the streets again myself over Vietnam.’

He gazed at me with dark searching eyes. ‘First, because on that they’re right. Second, because we may need some of those characters. And if you’re going to work with people, you can’t afford to be too different.’

That was a good political maxim, such as old Bevill might have approved of. Charles had not for a long while spoken straight out about the career he hoped for: in fact, I thought that he was still unsure, except in negatives. It would have been easy for him to become an academic, but he had ruled that out. He would work like a professional for a good degree – but that was all he had volunteered. As we were in sympathy, unusually close, that night, I said: ‘Is this what you’re planning for yourself?’

I didn’t have to be explicit. The kind of leader he had been eloquent about, the next impulse in politics.

He gave a disarming, untypically boyish smile.

‘Oh, I’ve had my megalomaniac dreams, naturally I have. The times I used to walk round the fields at school. But no. That’s not for me.’

For an instant, I was surprised that he was so positive. ‘Why not?’

‘Look, you heard me say, a minute ago, that it may not be possible. The whole idea. Well, anyone who’s going to bring it off would never have said that. He’s got to be convinced every instant of his waking life. He’s got to think of nothing else, he’s got to eat and breathe it. That’s how the magic comes. But that’s what I couldn’t do. I’m not made for absolute faith. I’m probably too selfish, or anyway I can’t forget myself enough.’

He had more self-knowledge, or at least more knowledge of his limits, I realised, than I had at his age, and older. But he was young enough to add with a jaunty optimistic air:

‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that I mightn’t make a pretty adequate number two. If someone with the real quality came along. I could do a reasonable job as a tactical adviser.’

A little later, still comfortably intimate (it was one of the bonuses of that singular day) Charles and I walked back through the old streets to the gate of my own college. I had told him that I should have to hurry to put through the telephone call; and so he left me there, saying, with a friendly smile, ‘Good luck.’ We each had our superstitions and he would never have wished me that if I had been waiting for news, any more than I should have done to him before an examination. It was just a parting gift.

I had brought with me the private secretary’s home number, but I had to wait a good many minutes before I heard his voice.

‘Hallo, Lewis, are you all right?’ I had known him when I was in Whitehall and he one of the brightest young principals. I apologised for disturbing him so late.

‘I should have been worried if you hadn’t. Well, what do you want me to report?’

I gave all the ritual regrets, but still I had to say no. A letter was on its way. Very slight pause, then the clear Treasury voice. ‘I was rather hoping you’d come down the other way.’ Like most aides-de-camp, he tended to speak as though it was he I had to answer to. I could have a few more hours to think it over, he said, there might be other means of persuasion. At my end, another slight pause. Then, quickly, brusquely: ‘No, this is final, Larry.’ One or two more attempts to put it off – but Larry was used to judging answers, and, though he was duplicating Hector Rose’s career, he didn’t duplicate Hector Rose’s ceremonial. ‘Right,’ came the brisk tone. ‘I’ll pass it on. I am very sorry about this, Lewis. I am very sorry personally.’

All over. No, not quite all over. There was something else to do. I went into my bedroom, and there, shining white on the chest of drawers, was the letter I had not yet sent. I had told a lie to my son. Not a major lie – but still, quite pointlessly, for underneath the resolve was made, I hadn’t brought myself to send the letter off. Had I really hoped that Francis Getliffe would dissuade me, or even Charles, or that there would be some miraculous intervention which would give me the chance to change my mind, pressure from a source unknown?

Probably not. It was just because the wavering was so pointless that I felt a wince of shame. It wasn’t the crimes or vices that made one stand stock-still and shut one’s eyes, it was the sheer sillinesses that one couldn’t stop. Vacillations, silly bits of pretence – those were things one didn’t like to face in oneself: even though one knew that in the end they would make no difference. I wondered whether young Charles, who seemed so strong, went through them too.

It wasn’t that night but later, when I recalled that I behaved in the same manner, ludicrously the same manner, once before. At the time that I was sending my letter of admission to the Bar and a cheque for two hundred pounds (to me, at nineteen, most of the money that I possessed). Then, just as today, the resolve was formed. Everyone I knew was advising me against, but nevertheless, as with Charles, my will was strong and I went through with the risk. But only after nights of hesitations, anxieties, withdrawals: only after a night when I had boasted of the gamble, talking to my friends rather in the vein of Hotspur having a few stiff words with reluctant troops. I explained how the letter – which committed me – had been sent off that day. Then, at midnight, after the celebration, I had returned to my bed-sitting-room and found the letter waiting there, the sight of it reproaching me, telling me there was still time to back out.

Then I had been nineteen. Now I was sixty. That had been, in Charles’ phrase, the beginning of one of my lines (the first letter went off at last, and I duly read for the Bar). Tonight was the end of that line. Delaying a little less than I had done at nineteen, a few hours less, I went out into the empty moonlit street to post the letter.

15: Waking Up to Well-being

MARGARET, glad about the outcome, more glad because the quarrel had dissolved, believed with Francis Getliffe that I should be cross with myself. I might have believed that also: certainly I was incredulous, as though I were observing astonishing reactions in some Amazonian Indian when I found how equable I was. True, I had my jags of resentment. As I opened the paper one morning and saw the job had been filled – it had gone to Lord Luke of Salcombe, which added a touch of irony – I pointed to the announcement and said to Margaret: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ On the moment, I was blaming her, it was the kind of gibe which wasn’t all a gibe: but I shouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been serene underneath.

It would be a singular apotheosis for Walter Luke, making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords. Only a few years before he had been denouncing politicians and administrators with fervent impartiality. Stuffed shirts! Those blasted uncles! Out of inquisitiveness and perhaps fellow feeling, I went along to hear his first ministerial speech. Walter’s cubical head looming over the box: the rich West-Country intonation that he had never lost. As for the speech itself, it was competent, neither good nor bad. His civil servants had put in all the safeguards and qualifications which used to evoke his considerable powers of abuse. Walter uttered them now with every appearance of solidarity, as though they were great truths. But, then, so should I have had to utter them.

That afternoon, walking past Palace Yard in one of the first autumn fogs, I was again mystified that I should be so serene. Work was going well, but there I wasn’t at the mercy of my moods; it would have gone as well if I had been cursing myself. Margaret and I were entertaining more than we usually did, catching up with friends and acquaintances, the Marches, the Roses, the Getliffes, Muriel, Vicky Shaw and her father. That was agreeable: but it wasn’t the origin of my present state.

The secret lay – though I should never have predicted it – in the sheer fact of saying no, in what Charles called my abdication. Certainly I had seen others, among them my brother Martin, gain a gratification out of giving up ‘the world’ – in Martin’s case, when he was very much in it and with the prizes dangling in front of him; he had become content, or even euphoric, out of great expectations denied. But that wasn’t so with me. This job of Walter Luke’s – orating in the fog-touched chamber – hadn’t been part of my own expectations. No, the satisfaction came, if I understood it at all, from one’s own will. In most of the events of a lifetime, the will didn’t play a part. We were tossed about in the stream, corks bobbing manfully, shouting confidently that they could go upstream if they felt inclined. Somehow, though, the corks, explaining that it would be foolish to go upstream, went on being carried the opposite way.

Very rarely one was able to exercise one’s will. Even then it might be an illusion, but it was an illusion that brought something like joy. It could happen when one was taking a risk or remaking a life. Sometimes I speculated whether people at the point of suicide felt this kind of triumph of the will. I should have liked to think that Sheila went out like that. What did Austin Davidson feel as he swallowed his pills and took what he believed to be his last drink?

Earlier, it would have been easy to ask him. No one would have been less embarrassed than Davidson, and he would have given an account of classical lucidity. During one of my visits that November, I began telling him of my experience, in the hope that I might lead on to his own. But I hadn’t realised, nor had Margaret, seeing him so often, how much further away he had slipped. When I told him that I had been offered the job, he said, eyes vacantly staring: ‘Did they give you a book?’

I wanted to leave it, but he insisted. I said, no, since I had refused, I didn’t get anything: and then, slowly, sickeningly slowly to one who had been so clever, I tried to explain. Government. Ministers. Politics.

He strained to comprehend, cheeks flushed. He managed to say: ‘No serious man has anything to do with politics.’

With relief at getting a little communication, I said that was a good apostolic pre-1914 sentiment. Then I hurried on, abandoning any attempt to try a new question. I went back to the familiar conversational forms. Those he could still understand, and, for some of the time (it was the longest of hours), take part in.

As soon as I returned home, I asked Margaret – what had been her impression of him earlier that week? Much as he usually was, she replied: not taking much interest, but he hadn’t done for months. I told her that I thought I saw – I might be imagining it – a difference. If I’d seen him for the first time that afternoon, I shouldn’t have given him long to go.

‘Of course it may just be a bad day,’ I said. ‘But I think you ought to be prepared.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’

Prepared, perhaps, both for loss and for relief. The strain of the long illness told on her more than on me, because it was she who loved him. If you loved – instead of being fond of – someone taking a long time to die, there were times when you wanted the release. What had been my mother’s phrase for it? A happy release. One of those hypocritical labels which half-revealed a truth. Then, when the release came, you felt the loss more, because it was mixed with guilt. As with so many consequences of love, what you lost on the swings you lost also on the roundabouts.

Meanwhile, I believed that I knew a way to give him pleasure. I had tried it once before – any more often, and he would have been suspicious. He was physically capable of reading, so the doctors said, and yet he refused even to glance at a newspaper. Still, one had to allow for remote chances. It meant a certain amount of contrivance, and a visit to my stockbroker.

Late the following week – I had seen him in the interval – I entered the familiar, the too familiar, hospital room, catching the smell of chrysanthemums and chemicals, with underneath the last echo of cigarette smoke and faeces. From the bed Davidson muttered, but it was not until I was facing him that he looked at me. Instead of sitting at the end of the bed, I carried a chair round to his left-hand side. It was becoming forlorn to expect that he would begin a conversation. I had to start straight off: ‘You’ve not lost your touch, you know.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he said in a dull tone.

‘I was telling you, you haven’t lost your touch. You’ve made me quite a bit of money.’

The bird-brown eyes flickered. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You did some listening to financial pundits in your time, didn’t you? Well, you’re not the only one.’

He gave the sketch of a smile.

‘Do you remember telling me about a year ago’ – actually it was slightly longer, soon after he was taken into the clinic – ‘that you guessed that it was time to go into metals? Particularly nickel. And you produced some rules about the right kind of share. I tell you, I did some listening. And took some action.’

‘Unwise. You forgot the first rule of investment. Never act on tips from an enthusiastic amateur.’ He was shaking his head, but there was colour in his voice.

‘You’re about as much an amateur as the late lamented Dr W G Grace.’

This esoteric remark, to begin to understand which one had to be born (a) in England, (b) not later than 1920, made him laugh. Not for long, but audibly, sharply.

‘So I took some action. I thought you might as well know the exact score – here’s a letter from my broker. Would you like to read it–?’

‘No, you read.’

The letter said – ‘The purchase of Claymor Nickel has turned out very profitable for you. We bought on Oct. 14, 1964, 3000 shares, which then stood at 21/6. The price this morning is 47/9. This shows a gross gain of just under £4000. If you wish to sell, there will as you know be a capital gains tax of 30%, but the net profit will still be £2600 approximately. However, in our opinion the price is likely to rise still higher.’

I broke off: ‘I said, you haven’t lost your touch, have you?’

‘One can’t help being right occasionally, don’t you know.’ But he was very pleased, so pleased that he went on talking, though he had to stop for breath. ‘Anyway, I’ve not made you poorer, which is more than one can say of most advice. That is, unless you’ve taken some other tips from me which have probably been disastrous–’

‘Not one.’

‘I must admit, it’s agreeable to be some trivial use to you. Even when one’s finishing up in this damned bedroom. It’s not unpleasant to be some trivial use–’

‘I don’t call it trivial–’

Davidson lifted his head a few inches from the pillows. His expression was lively and contented. In a tone in which one could hear some of his old authority, which in fact was curiously minatory, he said: ‘Now you ought to get out of that holding. Tomorrow. They may go higher. But remember, tops and bottoms are made for fools. That was the old Rothschild maxim, and they didn’t do too badly out of it.’

‘Right,’ I said obediently.

‘There’s another point. I should consider that your unit of investment was too large. £3000 – that was it, wasn’t it? – is far too much for this kind of risk. It came off this time, but it won’t always, you follow. You’ve heard the units that I use myself–’

‘I had more faith in you.’

‘You oughtn’t to have that much faith in anyone–’

I had not heard him take so much part in the duologue for many months. His manner, despite the heavy breathing, stayed minatory and on the attack: but that meant he was enjoying himself or at least self-forgetful. He even asked me to pour him a small whisky, although it was not yet four in the afternoon. It might have been a device to make me stay, for he insisted – suddenly reminding me of Charles as a child, importuning me to talk to him before he went to sleep – that I pour another for myself.

When at last I was outside the clinic, standing in the Marylebone Road looking for a taxi, I felt a little more than the usual emancipation. The afternoon had been easy: of course it was good to be out: slivers of rain shone, as though they were frozen, past the nearest street lamp, and then bounced from the glistening pavement. I felt some of that zest – disgraceful and yet not to be denied – which came from being well in the presence of someone who couldn’t be well again. The lift in one’s step, which ought for decency’s sake to be a reproach, just wasn’t: it was good to breathe the dank autumnal air. It was not unpleasant, even, to stand in the rain waiting for a taxi. For an instant, a surreptitious thought occurred to me: it was rather a pity that I hadn’t, in cold fact, bought shares on the old man’s judgment. Either those or any others. The trouble was, I believed too much in his maxim about enthusiastic amateurs. If I hadn’t, if I had trusted him, I should have been a good deal better off.

That visit took place on a Monday. It was not on the following morning, but on the Wednesday that I woke up early, so early that the window was quite dark. I lay there, comfortable, not sure whether I should go to sleep again or not. It was pleasant to think of the day ahead, lying relaxed and well. Perhaps I dozed off. Light was coming through the curtains. As in a sleep-start, I jerked into consciousness. There was a blackout over the far corner of my left eye.

I knew what that meant, too well. I went to the windows, pulled a curtain, looked out over the Tyburn garden to a clear early morning sky. Trying to cheat the truth, I blinked the eye and opened it again. Yes, for an instant the blackout seemed dissolved. Comfort. Then it surged back again. A clear black edge. Against the lightening sky, a little smoky film beyond the edge.

I couldn’t cheat myself any longer. I knew what that meant, too well. The retina had come loose once more. Perhaps the veil didn’t spread so far as the other time. But I was complaining, Good God, this is rough, could I face going through all that again?

Margaret was still quiet in her morning sleep. There was no point in waking her. Minutes didn’t matter, and I could tell her soon enough.

16: Into Oblivion

BEFORE breakfast, Margaret rang up Mansel, the ophthalmologist who had operated on me before. We had learned his timetable by now, since he had been inspecting my eyes each month or so. He would call in, Margaret told me, about eleven, on his way from the hospital to Harley Street.

As we sat waiting, I said to Margaret: ‘He’ll want to have another shot.’

‘Let’s see what he says.’

‘I’m quite sure he’ll want to.’ I added: ‘But I’m not so sure that I can bear it.’

I wasn’t thinking of the operation, in itself that didn’t matter, but of the days afterwards, lying still, blinded, helpless in the dark. Though I had managed to control it, I had always had more than my share of claustrophobia. As I grew older, it got more oppressive, not less; and lying blinded for days brought on something like claustrophobia squared. The previous time had been pretty near my limit: or so it seemed looking back, even more than when I was going through it.

Margaret wanted to distract me. She said how this would have been more than a nuisance if I had been in government.

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t take that job,’ she said.

‘If I had taken it, this mightn’t have happened,’ I replied.

Oh come, Margaret said, glad to have found an argument, that was taking psychosomatic thinking altogether too far. But I didn’t respond for long.

When Mansel arrived, he was as usual brisk and elegant, busy and unhurried.

‘I’m sorry to hear about this, sir,’ he said to me.

We had come to know each other well, but it was a curious intimacy, in which he, almost young enough to be my son, insisted on calling me Sir, while I insisted on calling him by his Christian name. I admired him as a superb professional, and he listened to my observations as possibly useful to his clinical stock-in-trade.

While making conversation to Margaret, he was without fuss disconnecting a reading lamp, fixing a bulb of his own. The drawing-room was just as good as anywhere else, he said to her with impersonal cheerfulness. He had brought a case with him, packed with White Knight equipment invented by himself: but, searching into the back of my eyes, he had never used anything more subtle than an ordinary lens. As he did now, lamp shining on the eye, Mansel asking me to look behind my head, to the left, down, all the drill which I knew by heart.

He didn’t waste time. Within half a minute he was saying:

‘There’s no doubt, I’m afraid. Bad luck.’

Not quite in the same place as before, he remarked. Then, with some irritation, he said that there hadn’t been any indication or warning, the last time he examined me, only a month before. If we were cleverer at spotting these things in advance, he went into a short professional soliloquy. It would have been easy enough to use photolysis: why couldn’t we get a better warning system?

‘No use jobbing back,’ he said, as though reproaching me. ‘Well, we shall have to try and make a better go of it this time.’

I glanced at Margaret: that was according to plan.

‘Look, Christopher,’ I said, ‘is it really worthwhile?’

His antennae were quick.

‘I know it’s an awful bore, sir, I wish we could have saved you that–’

‘What do I get in return? It’s only vestigial sight at the best. After all that.’

Mansel gazed at each of us in turn, collected, strong-willed.

‘All I can give you is medical advice. But anyone in my place would have to tell you the same. I’m afraid you ought to have another operation.’

‘It can’t give him much sight, though, can it?’ Margaret wanted to be on my side.

‘This sounds callous, but you both know it as well as I do,’ said Mansel. ‘A little sight is better than no sight. There is a finite chance that the other eye might go. We’re taking every precaution, but it might. Myopic eyes are slightly more liable to this condition than normal eyes. Any medical advice is bound to tell you, you ought to insure against the worst. If the worst did come to the worst, and you’d only got left what you had yesterday in the bad eye – well, you could get around, you wouldn’t be cut off.’

‘I couldn’t read.’

‘I’m not pretending it would be pleasant. But you could see people, you could even look at TV. I assure you, sir, that if you’d seen patients who would give a lot even for that amount of sight–’

Margaret came and sat by me. ‘I’m afraid he’s right,’ she said quietly.

‘Would you like to discuss it together?’ Mansel asked with firm politeness.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Intellectually I suppose you are right. Let’s get it over with.’

I said it in bad grace and a bad temper, but Mansel didn’t mind about that. He had, as usual, got his way.

He and Margaret were talking about the timetable.

‘If it’s all right with you, sir,’ Mansel turned to me, ‘there’s everything to be said for going into hospital this morning.’

‘It’s all one to me.’

‘Well done,’ said Mansel, as though I were an industrious but not specially bright pupil. ‘Last time, you remember, you had an engagement you said you couldn’t break. That delayed us for three or four days. I thought it was rather overconscientious, you know.’

I wasn’t prepared to bring those episodes back to mind: any more than to recall a visit to my old father, purely superstitious, just to placate the fates before an operation. Which my father, with his remarkable gift for reducing any situation to bathos, somewhat spoiled by apparently believing that I was suffering from a rupture, the only physical calamity which he seemed to consider possible for a grown-up man.

I was too impatient to recall any of that. I was thinking of nothing but the days laid out in the post-operational dark. I had no time for my own superstitions or anyone else’s chit-chat: I was in a hurry to get back into the light.

Within an hour I was already lying on my back, with the blindfolds on. Margaret had driven with me to the hospital, while I gazed out at people walking busily along the dingy stretch of the City Road: not a glamorous sight unless anything visible was better than none. To me, those figures in the pallid November sunshine looked as though they were part of a mescalin dream.

In the hospital, I was given the private room I had occupied before. Someone – through a mysterious performance of the bush telegraph which I didn’t understand – had already sent flowers. As she said goodbye, Margaret remarked that last time (operations took place in the morning) I had been quite lucid by the early evening. She would come and talk to me just before or after dinner tomorrow.

After she had left, I assisted in the French sense in the hospital drill. In bed: eyes blacked out: I even assisted in the receipt of explanations which I had heard before. Some nurse, whom I could recognise only by voice, told me that both eyes had to be blinded in order to give the retina a chance to settle under gravity; if the good eye was working, the other couldn’t rest.

Helpless. Legs stretched like a knight’s on a tomb: not a crusader knight’s because I wasn’t supposed to cross them. Just as Sheila’s father’s used to stretch, when he was taking care of himself.

‘Mr Mansel is very liberal,’ said another nurse’s voice. With some surgeons, a few years before, I should have had sandbags on both sides of my head. So that it stayed dead still. For a fortnight.

Tests. Blood pressure – that I could recognise. Blood samples. Voices across me, as though I were a cadaver. Passive subject, lying there. How easy to lose one’s ego. Persons wondered why victims were passive in the concentration camps. Anyone who wondered that ought to be put into hospital, immobilised, blinded. Nothing more dramatic than that.

Once or twice I found my ego, or at least asserted it. The anaesthetist was in the room, and a couple of nurses. ‘I’ve been here before, you know,’ I said. ‘The other time, when I came round, I was as thirsty as hell.’

‘That’s a nuisance, isn’t it?’ said the anaesthetist.

‘I suppose you dehydrate one pretty thoroughly.’

‘As a matter of fact, we do.’ A genial chuckle.

‘Can anything be done about it? Tomorrow afternoon?’

‘I’m afraid you will be thirsty.’

‘Is it absolutely necessary to be intolerably thirsty for hours? They gave me drops of soda water. That’s about as useful as a couple of anchovies.’

‘I’ll see what can be done.’

‘That’s too vague,’ I said. ‘Look here, I don’t complain much–’

I wrung some sort of promise that I might have small quantities of lime juice instead of soda water. That gave me disproportionate satisfaction, as though it were a major victory.

In the evening, though when I didn’t know, for already I was losing count of time, Mansel called in. ‘All bright and cheerful, sir?’ came the light, clear, upper-class voice.

‘That would be going rather far, Christopher,’ I said. Mansel chortled as though I had touched the heights of repartee. He wanted to have one more look at my eye. So, for a couple of minutes, I could survey the lighted bedroom. As with the figures in the City Road, the chairs, the dressing table, the commode stood out, preternaturally clear-edged.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mansel, replacing the pads with fingers accurate as a billiards-player’s. ‘All correct. See you early tomorrow morning.’

How early, again I didn’t know, for they had given me sleeping pills, and I was only half-awake when people were talking in the bedroom. ‘No breakfast, Sir Lewis,’ said the nurse, in a firm and scolding tone. ‘Nothing to drink.’

Someone pricked my arm. That was the first instalment of the anaesthetics, and I wanted to ask what they used. I said something, not clearly, still wanting to be sentient with the rest of them. In time (it might have been any time) a voice was saying: ‘He’s nearly out.’ With the last residue of will, I wanted to say no. But, as through smoke whirling in a tunnel, I was carried, the darkness soughing round me, into oblivion.