Last Things

26: Dispensation

LYING in bed in the hospital, set free by the talisman of 28 November, I hadn’t so much as wondered how long this state would last. If I had even wanted to wonder so, it would have been a false freedom. And whatever it was (it might make nonsense of a good deal that I expected or imagined), it was not false. Fortuitous, if you like, but not false.

It transferred itself easily enough into my everyday life, as soon as I got back. In a fashion which would have seemed curiously unfair, if they had known about it, to those who thought that all along I had been luckier than I deserved. For the bad times got dulled, shrugged off as though if 28 November had gone the other way they wouldn’t have existed. But, by a paradoxical kind of grace, the reverse didn’t apply, the dispensation wasn’t symmetrical: on the contrary, the good times became sharper. Shortly after I left hospital, I published a book which I liked and which fell, not exactly flat, but jaggedly. If that had happened in early November, it would have cost me some bad days. As it was, though I didn’t pretend to be indifferent (changes in mood are not so complete as that), I had put it behind me almost as soon as it occurred. Shortly afterwards – and this was just as surprising – I found myself revelling, without any barricade of sarcasm or touching wood, in a bit of praise.

There had been a time when I used to declare, with a kind of defiance: you had to enjoy your joys, and suffer your sufferings. As I knew well enough, I had more talent for the latter. I had managed to subjugate the depressive streak in action, and conceal it from others and sometimes myself, but it was there half-hidden: it wasn’t entirely an accident that I could guess when Roy Calvert was going to swing from the manic into its other phase. With me, what for Roy was manic showed itself only as a kind of high spirits or an excessive sense of expectation: most of the time, I had to watch, as better and robuster characters had to watch, for the alternate phase. Now the balance had been tilted, and I felt myself closer than I had ever been before to people whom I had once in secret thought thick-skinned and prosaic: people who weren’t menaced by melancholy and who were better than I was at enjoying themselves.

It was a singular dispensation to overtake one at sixty, faintly comic, humbling and yet comforting.

When Margaret’s father had died, which he did in his sleep in the January of 1966, two months after my operation, she and I were alone together as in the first days of marriage. More alone, for then she had been looking after Maurice in his infancy. Just as when we returned to the flat the previous autumn, it was both a treat and strange to be there by ourselves. We spun time out, lengthening the moments, making the most of them. Work was over for me now by the early afternoon: after that, we were alone and free. I had got rid of any duties outside the home. We had time to ourselves, as we had not had when we were first married. We were able to look at each other, not as though it were the first time (when one sees nothing but one’s own excitement), but as though we were on holiday, waking up fresh in a hotel.

In another case, it was as fresh when I walked with my son on spring evenings in the park. I was listening to him, not as though he had changed, but as though something had changed between us. Not that I was less interested in him, or in his friends. Actually, I had become more so, but in a different fashion. I was less engaged in competing with them, or proving to Charles that they were wrong. My brother Martin had once said, after his renunciation: ‘People matter: relations between them don’t matter much.’ Whether he ever thought of that, in his troubles with his own son, I didn’t know: if so it must have seemed a black joke against himself. But it was somewhere near the way (so I thought, and didn’t have a superstitious tremor) in which I was now taking pleasure in Charles’ company. I was interested in him and the rest of them, excited, stimulated by their energies and hopes: it was like being given a slice of life to watch and to draw refreshment from, so long as one could keep from taking part oneself.

It didn’t seem like an ageing man’s interest in the flow of life, or Francis Getliffe’s patriarchal delight in his children and grandchildren and those of his friends, the delight of life going on. It didn’t even seem so much like a bit of continuous creation, in which through being engrossed in other lives one was making a new start for oneself. It might, I thought casually, have been all of those things: but if it were I didn’t care. I felt closer than that, through being given a privileged position, having those energies under my eyes: it was much more like being engaged with my own friends at the same age, except that I – with my anxieties, perturbations, desires and will – had been satisfactorily (and for my own liberation) removed.

It was at the end of the Easter vacation, when Charles had returned from another of his trips, that he got into the habit of asking me out for an evening walk. He was home only for a week; each day about half past five, active, springy on his feet, he looked at me with eyebrows raised, and we went into the park for what became our ritual promenade. Out by the Albion Gate: across the grass, under the thickening trees, along the path to the Serpentine, by the side of the Row to the Achilles statue, back along the eastern verge towards Marble Arch. It might have been two old clubmen going through their evening routine, I told him after the second trip: Charles grinned companionably, and next day started precisely the same course.

His conversation, however, was not much like an old clubman’s. He was relaxed, because I was the right distance from him: the right distance, that is, for him to talk and me to listen. I took in more about his friends than I had done before, and believed more, now that I wasn’t conducting a dialectic with him. Yes, they were more serious than I had let myself admit. Their politics (his less than the others) might be utopian, but they were their own. They were probably no better or no worse thought out than ours had been, but they came from a different ground.

The results could be curiously different. Charles and his circle were more genuinely international than any of us had been. The minor nationalisms seemed to have vanished quite. They were not even involved in Europe, though most of them had travelled all over it. It was the poor world that captured their imagination: the Grand Tour had to be uncomfortable and also squalid nowadays, said Charles with a sarcastic smile. That was what he had been conducting in Asia before he was seventeen, and this present vacation he had been rounding it off in Africa.

They weren’t specially illusioned. They didn’t imagine an Elysium existing here and now upon this earth, as young men and women of their kind in the 1930s sometimes imagined Russia or less often the United States. It was true, dark world-views didn’t touch them much. They might bear – in that year 1966 and later – people like Francis Getliffe and me saying that objectively the world looked grimmer than at any time in our lives. They might analyse and understand the reasons which made us say so. But they didn’t in the end believe it. They were alive for anything that was going to happen. That was bound to be so: you live in your own time.

Listening to Charles those evenings, I thought that, not only did his friends’ opinions have more to them than I had been willing to grant, but so had he. He seemed more of a sport – that is, less like me or Martin, less like anyone on Margaret’s side – than I had believed. The family patterns didn’t fit. He wasn’t so easy to domesticate. There were contradictions in him that I hadn’t seen before.

This was striking home all through that week: on one of the last evenings, I could not help but see it clear. We had just crossed the bridge over the water: it was a dense and humid April night, but with no clouds in the darkening sky; Charles suddenly began to press me about, of all subjects, the works of Tolkien. I turned towards him, ready to say something sharp, such as that he ought to know that I had no taste for fancy. His eyes left mine, looked straight ahead.

I met his profile, dolichocephalic, straight-nosed, hair curling close to his head. On the moment he looked unfamiliar, not at all how I imagined him to look. Curious: feature by feature, of course, the genes had played their part, the hair was Martin’s, the profile Austin Davidson’s: but the result was strange. So strange that I might have been gazing at a young man I didn’t recognise, much less understand. The sharp repartee dropped away, I said that naturally I would give this favourite of his a try.

Curious, I was thinking again. He was in many respects more concentrated and practical than I had been at his age, or maybe was now: almost certainly, when he wanted something, he was more ruthless. Yet, if I had no taste for fancy, he had enough for two: whimsies, fantasies, they hadn’t been left behind in childhood. With him they co-existed, and would continue to co-exist with adult desires and adult fulfilments: he was one of those, or would become one, who had the gift of being able to feel guilty with Dostoevsky, innocent with hobbits, passionately insistent with a new girlfriend, all on the same day.

Good, he was saying affectionately, as I promised to read the book.

As we walked on, other contradictions of his became as clear. He had proved his own kind of courage. Whether he had set out to prove it to himself, no one knew: but the fact was, none of my contemporaries, not even those as adventurous as the young Francis Getliffe, would at sixteen have contemplated setting out on solitary expeditions such as his. As for me, it would have seemed about as plausible – for reasons of pennilessness in addition to physical timidity – as trying to round the Horn. Of course, most of Charles’ friends travelled further than we did: but he was the one who had made it into a trial of nerve. Not nerve, just patience, he explained with a straight face. All calculated and singularly deliberate, as though he had reverted to one of those nineteenth-century Englishmen with private means, scholarly tastes, and inordinate self-will.

And yet, he was nervous, more so than most of us, in another old-fashioned, even a primitive sense. When he had arrived back safe after his second trip and had produced some understatements which were not so modest as they sounded, I asked him how much I should have to pay him to sleep (a) in a haunted house, (b) in a graveyard. Again straight-faced, he said: ‘As for (a), more than you could afford. For (b), no offers accepted. And I suppose you’d do either for half a bottle of Scotch. Or less. Wouldn’t you?’

He was being, as usual, truthful about himself. He was capable of getting frightened by ghost stories. There were still occasions, after he had been reading, when he carefully forgot to turn off his bedroom lamp.

Walking by his side – lights were coming on in St George’s Hospital – I mentioned, as though by free association, the name of Gordon Bestwick. This was a friend of his, whom I had met, but only casually, at Christmas time. Charles, protective about any of his circle, wasn’t easy about Gordon’s health, and had been suggesting that I should go to Cambridge next term, and meet him again, to see what my opinion was.

‘Why did you think of him?’ said Charles, clear-voiced.

‘Oh, it just occurred to me that he might be more rational than you are.’

Charles chuckled.

‘I’ve told you, he’s a bit like you. He’s our Bazarov, you know.’

That was a complicated private reference. Charles must have picked up from Francis Getliffe or more probably his wife, the impression that I made on the Marches when they first befriended me. A poor young man: positive: impatient with the anxieties of the rich. Making them feel overdelicate, overnurtured, frail by the side of a new force. In fact, their impression was in most respects fallacious. My character seemed to them more all-of-a piece and stronger just because I was poor and driven on: in the long run, much of the frailty was not on their side but mine. Still, they called me after Turgenev’s hero and for a while made a similar legend about me. And that was what Charles and his circle were duplicating in their reception of Gordon Bestwick.

Charles had met him at Trinity, both of them scholars in their first year. He came from a lorry driver’s family in Smethwick. He was extremely clever; according to Charles, brought up in one of the English academic hothouses, at least as clever as anyone he had known at school. Bestwick was reading economics and had much contempt for the soft subjects, which sounded Bazarov-like enough. I had talked to him only for a few minutes, but no one could have missed noticing his talent. Otherwise he had some presence without being specially prepossessing, and if Charles hadn’t forced his name upon me, I doubted whether I should have gone out of my way to see him again.

That evening, as we were turning parallel to Park Lane, Charles reiterated his praise.

‘He may easily be the ablest of us,’ he said. He was pertinacious, prepared to be boring, about someone he believed in. ‘He’s certain to be a very valuable character.’

He added, with an oblique smile: ‘He’s even a very valuable member of the cell.’

They thought of themselves – it didn’t need saying – as student revolutionaries: Charles knew that I knew: though he, on that October night when I told him of what he called my abdication, had defined with political accuracy where he stood.

He was gazing to our left, where, in the west, over the London smoke, one of the first stars had come out. Charles regarded it with simple pleasure, just as my father might have done. I recalled night walks when I was in trouble, getting some peace from looking at the stars.

‘Old Gordon,’ Charles remarked with amusement, ‘says that we’re fooling ourselves about space travel. We shall never get anywhere worthwhile. He says that science fiction is the modern opium of the people.’

He added: ‘Sensible enough for you, isn’t he?’

During that conversation, and the others we had that week, Charles did not leave out the name of Muriel. He brought it in along with a dozen more, without either obtruding it or playing it down. He spoke of her as though she were one of the inner group (which included not only school and Cambridge friends, but also one or two studying in London, such as his cousin Nina), but he didn’t single her out or ask a question about her.

27: Discussion of Someone Absent

WHEN Muriel herself invited me to her house one evening, shortly after Charles had gone back to Cambridge, she began in very much the same tone as he had used of her: but there came a time when she was not quite so cautious.

She had asked me round for a drink before dinner, on the first Monday of the month, which happened to be a day when Margaret was regularly occupied with her one and only charity. I had been to Chester Row once before, to a party the preceding summer: I had forgotten that Muriel’s house was a long way up the road, near the church, not far from where Matthew Arnold used to repose himself, all seventeen stone of him.

The door was smelling of fresh paint, there was a tub of wallflowers outside, a flower box under the ground-floor windows, everything burnished and neat. The housekeeper told me, in a decorous whisper, as though she had been infected by the house’s hush, that Mrs Calvert was waiting for me in the drawing-room upstairs (Muriel had reverted to her maiden name the day that the divorce came through).

In fact, she was standing at the end of the first-floor corridor.

‘How very good of you to come, Uncle Lewis,’ she called out, light and clear. ‘It’s such a long way to drag you, isn’t it?’

It was not much more than a mile. As usual, following her into the drawing-room, I was put off by her politeness, which seemed like a piece of private fun.

She led me to an armchair beside the window, enquired what she should give me to drink and precisely how I liked it, fitted me with coffee table, glass and cigarettes, and then sat down opposite me in a hard-backed upright chair. She was dressed with Quakerish simplicity, white blouse, dark skirt: and the skirt, though it showed an inch or two of thigh, looked long that year on a woman of twenty-three.

‘I’m so sorry that Aunt Meg couldn’t come too,’ she said. ‘It’s one of her trust days, isn’t it? I ought to have remembered that, it’s very bad of me. One oughtn’t to be careless like that, ought one?’

It was only then that I suspected she hadn’t been so careless. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted me by myself, or could have any motive for it.

‘Do please tell Aunt Meg that I am dreadfully sorry. I want to see her so much.’

Muriel fixed me with an intense, undeviating gaze. I had admired her acute green eyes (which others called hazel, or even yellow) before, but I hadn’t met them full on until now. They had a slight squint, such as was required from prize Siamese cats before the trait was bred out. It might have been a disfigurement or even comic, but on the spot it made her eyes harder to escape: more than that, it made one more aware of her presence.

Self-consciously (I was more self-conscious with this girl than I was used to being) I looked round the room.

‘How fine this is,’ I said.

That was a distraction, but also the truth. It was an L-shaped room, running the whole length of the house, the front windows giving on the street, back window onto her strip of garden, from which an ash tree extended itself, three storeys high. Edging through the same back window came the last of the sunlight, falling on two pictures, by painters once thought promising, that I remembered in her father’s college rooms.

‘I’m so glad you like it,’ said Muriel. ‘I do think it’s rather good.’

‘We all envy you, you know.’

She gave a slight shrug. ‘The Victorian middle classes did themselves pretty well, didn’t they?’

‘So do you,’ I replied.

She didn’t like that. For an instant, she was frowning, her face looked less controlled, less young. Her self-possession for once seemed shaken. Then, springing up, graceful, she cried: ‘Look! You’ve never seen the house properly, have you, Uncle Lewis? Please let me show you, now.’

Show me she did, like a house agent taking round a possible though unknowledgeable buyer. It was one of those tall narrow-fronted houses common in that part of London, built (said Muriel precisely) between 1840 and 1845. Built for what kind of family? She wouldn’t guess. Professional? A doctor’s, who had his practice in the grand houses close by?

Anyway, it must have been more immaculate now than ever in the past. Basement flat at garden level, three rooms for the housekeeper, as spotless-fresh, as uninhabited-looking, as Muriel’s drawing-room. Dining-room on the ground floor, table laid for one, silver shining on the rosewood. Second floor, Muriel’s bedroom, scent-smelling, cover smooth in the evening light: as she stood beside me, she said there was another room adjacent, which we would come back to – ‘that is, if you can bear any more’.

She led the way up to the top storey, light-footed as an athlete. The main room was the nursery and I could hear infantile chortles. She hesitated outside the door. I said that I liked very small children. ‘No, forgive me, he’ll be having a feed.’ Instead she showed me two bedrooms on the same floor. That’s where she could put people up, she said. What people, I was wondering. Quick-eyed, she seemed to read my thoughts. American students who were forced out of Berkeley, she said. Those were the last two. They had something to teach us.

She climbed up some iron steps to a balcony garden: she was slim-waisted, she looked slight, but she was nothing like as fragile as she seemed. She gazed across the roofs and gardens before she descended, and took me downstairs again to the second floor. Then she opened the door next to her bedroom: ‘Would you really mind sitting here just for a little while?’

It was something between a boudoir and a study. There were plenty of bookshelves: there was a cupboard from which she brought another tray of drinks, though as before she didn’t take one herself. But also there were what appeared to be other cupboards for her dresses, a long mirror, a smaller looking glass in front of a dressing table. I had noticed another, more sumptuous dressing table in her bedroom: but I guessed that it was here she spent most of her time. It smelt of her scent, which was astringent, not heady: no doubt Lester Ince would have known the name. On the desk stood a large photograph of Azik Schiff and another which later I should have recognised as of Che Guevara, though at the time I had scarcely seen the face. That night I was wondering if this might be a lover: it wasn’t the only time that she sent me on a false direction. There was no picture of her mother, and none of her father, nor any reminder of him at all, except, very oddly, for a copy of the seventeenth-century engraving of our college’s first court, hanging in obscurity on the far wall.

‘I do hope I haven’t tired you,’ she said.

I said that it was a beautiful house. I went on: ‘You’re a lucky girl.’

‘Do you really think I am, Uncle Lewis?’ The question was deferential, but her eyes were once more staring me out.

‘By most people’s standards, yes, I think you are.’

‘Some people’s standards would be different, wouldn’t they? They might think it was wrong for anyone like me to have all this.’ Her eyes didn’t move, but there was a twitch, unapologetic, sardonic, to her mouth. ‘You couldn’t tell me it wasn’t wrong. Could you? It is, you know it, don’t you?’

‘I wasn’t talking about justice,’ I said. ‘I was talking about you.’

‘Isn’t that rather old-fashioned of you, though?’

To say I wasn’t provoked wouldn’t be true. I heard my words get rougher.

‘I don’t know whether you’re unhappy. But if you are, I do know that it’s more tolerable to be unhappy in comfort. You try working behind a counter when you’re miserable, and you’ll see.’

‘Aren’t you being rather feminine, Uncle Lewis? You’re reducing it all to personal things, you know. You can’t believe they matter all that much–’

‘They matter to most of us.’

‘Not if one has anything serious to do.’ Her manner was entirely cool. ‘Perhaps you don’t think I am serious, though. That would be rather old-fashioned of you. I’m very very sorry, but it would. Because I’ve got plenty of money again. Because I’m living a plushy bourgeois life – not so very different from yours, if I may say so. Then it’s artificial if I don’t accept this nice cosy world I’m living in. You don’t trust me if I want to have a hand in getting rid of it and starting something better. You think I’m playing at being discontented, don’t you? Isn’t that it?’

I thought, she was no fool, she was suspicious about me, her suspicions were shrewd. As I watched her face, disciplined except for the eye-flash, I had been reflecting on people like Dolfie Whitman, that invigilator of others’ promotion. Philippe Égalité radical, his enemies had called him. Rich malcontents. I had known a good many. Some had seemed dilettantes, or else too obviously getting compensation for a private wound. Often they weren’t the first allies you would choose to have on your side in a crisis. A few, though, were as unbending and committed as one could be. Such as the scientist Constantine or Charles March’s wife. What about this young woman? I was mystified, I couldn’t make any sort of judgment. I still had no idea why she wanted me in her house. Surely not to sit alone with her in her study, having an academic discussion on student protest, or any variety of New Left, or the place of women with large unearned incomes in radical movements?

It was time, I felt, to stop the fencing.

‘I don’t know you well enough to say.’ I went on: ‘You’re cleverer than I thought.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, gravely, politely, imperturbably, as unruffled as if I had congratulated her on a new dress. It was the manner which I couldn’t break through, and which had made me, not patronising as it might have sounded, but harsh and rude.

‘For all I know,’ I said, ‘you may be absolutely in earnest.’

‘It would be rather upsetting for you, wouldn’t it,’ she replied, ‘if you found I was.’

‘What do you hope for?’

She wasn’t at all put off. Her reply was articulate, much what I had heard from friends of Charles’, less qualified and political than from Charles himself. This country, America, the world she knew, weren’t good enough: there must be a chance of something better. The institutions (they sometimes called them structures) of our world had frozen everyone in their grip: they were dead rigid by now, universities, civil service, parliaments, the established order, the lot. One had to break them up. It might be destructive: you couldn’t write a blueprint for the future: but it would be a new start, it would be better than now.

All that I was used to; the only difference was one thing she didn’t say, which I was used to hearing. She didn’t talk about ‘your generation’, and blame us for the existing structures and the present state of things. Whether that was out of consideration, or whether she was keeping her claws sheathed, I couldn’t tell.

‘What can you do about it? You yourself?’

The question was another attempt to break through. She didn’t mind. Her reply was just as calm as before, and this time businesslike. Money was always useful. So was this house. She could help with the supply work. (I had a flickering thought of young women like her doing the same for the Spanish War and the ‘party’ thirty years before.) Of course she couldn’t do much. In any sort of action, though, one had to do what came to hand: wasn’t that true?

Yes, it was quite true. In fact, I fancied uneasily that I might have said it myself: and that she was impassively quoting it back at me.

‘Why are you in it at all?’

The first flash of anger. ‘You won’t admit I believe in it, will you?’

It was my turn to be calm. ‘I said before, you may be absolutely in earnest.’

‘But you really think it’s a good way to keep some men round me, don’t you? It’s a good way to keep in circulation, isn’t it?’

The words were still precise, the face demure with a kind of false and taunting innocence. But underneath the smooth skin there was a storm of temper only just held back.

‘I might even collect another husband, mightn’t I? If I was lucky. Now that would be a reason for being in it, you’d accept that, wouldn’t you?’

I said (she was suspicious of me again, this time the suspicion had gone wrong): ‘It hadn’t even occurred to me. I should have thought, if you did want another husband, you wouldn’t have to go to those lengths, would you?’

She gave what for her was an open smile, like a woman, utterly confident with men, suddenly enjoying an offhand, not over-flattering remark: ‘But now you’re talking about it,’ I went on, ‘I suppose you will get married again, some time?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’ Then she added, as though she had spoken too simply: ‘It’s the only thing I was brought up for, you see. And that isn’t a point in its favour, particularly.’

In the same quiet, judicious tone she was blaming her mother for her education, being prepared for nothing but that, protected, watched over. In the quiet judicious tone she wasn’t concealing that she disliked her mother – with not just a daughter’s ambivalence or rebellion, but with plain dislike. If she hadn’t been trained for the marriage stakes, she might have done something. Anyway she had made her own marriage. That hadn’t been a recommendation for trying it again. She didn’t refer to Pat with dislike, as she did her mother, but with detachment, not mentioning his name. She spoke of her marriage as though it had been an interesting historical event or an example of mating habits which she had happened to observe.

‘I don’t intend to make a mess of it again,’ she said. ‘But you needn’t worry about me. I shan’t die of frustration. I can look after myself.’

It seemed as though she was being blunt: but even when she seemed to be, and maybe was, trying to be direct, she could sound disingenuous at the same time. Was she suggesting, or stating, that she wasn’t going to risk another marriage, but took men when she wanted them? Was that true in fact?

There had been a time when I thought the opposite. As I watched her getting rid of Pat, or as the centre of attraction at one of the previous summer’s parties, it seemed to me that she might have had bad luck: the bad luck that goes with beauty. Not that her face was beautiful: people looked at her long nose, wide mouth, didn’t know how to describe her. Pretty? Alluring? But she behaved like others whom everyone called beautiful. It wasn’t good to be so. Those I had met – there were only two or three – had been unable to give love or else were frigid. It wasn’t simply the shape of a face that made others decide that a woman had the gift of beauty. They had to feel some quality which set her apart and came from inside. There was nothing supernatural about it: it might very well be a kind of remoteness, a sensual isolation or a narcissism.

Whatever it came from, the gift of beauty – as the old Yeats knew too well – was about the last one would wish for a daughter.

When I had seen Muriel surrounded by Charles and his friends, attention brushing off her, she was behaving as though she need not look at them, but only at herself. As I said, I thought then that she had had that specific bad luck, or, if you like, that fairy’s gift.

Now I had changed my mind. I didn’t know much about her, there were things which I couldn’t know: but I was fairly sure that she was less narcissistic than I had believed and, underneath the smooth, the sometimes glacial front, a good deal more restless. She didn’t radiate the hearty kind of sexuality that anyone could find in the presence of, for example, Hector Rose’s new wife. But she had – I wasn’t certain but I guessed – a kind of sexuality of her own. It might be hidden, conspiratorial, insinuating. Some man would discover it (I couldn’t tell whether Pat had or not), and then would find the two of them in a sensual complicity. It wouldn’t be hearty: it might even seem corrupt. But some man, not put off by whispers or secrets, enjoying the complicity, would find it. He might be fortunate or unfortunate, I couldn’t guess that far.

I didn’t like her. I never had: and, now that I had seen a little more, I didn’t like her any better. She might be easier to love than to like: but, if that was what she induced, it was a bad prospect for her and anyone who did love her so. If I had been younger, I should have shied away.

Yet, in a curious sense, I respected her. Of course, her attraction had its effect on me as on others. But though that sharpened my attention, it didn’t surround her with any haze or aura. She was there, visible and clear enough, not specially amiable, certainly not negligible. She was not much like anyone I had known. The links one could make with the past didn’t connect with her. She was there in her own right.

Earlier on, as we climbed up and down the house, and again when she talked about the programme of action, she had mentioned Charles. Almost precisely as he had mentioned her, when it would have been artificial, or even noteworthy, not to do so.

Now, shortly after she had switched on the reading lamp, which, throwing a pool of light upon the desk, also lit up both our faces, she asked a question. It was casual and matter-of-fact.

‘By the way, do please tell me, what is Charles going to do?’

‘What ever do you mean?’

She was smiling. ‘Please tell me. I’m fairly good at keeping quiet.’

I said: ‘I’m sure you are. But I’ve no idea what you mean.’

‘Haven’t you really?’

I shook my head.

She was still smiling, not believing me. To an extent, she was right not to believe.

‘Well then, do forgive me. What is he going to do about his career?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘But you must have.’

‘I’m not certain that he has himself. If so, he hasn’t told me.’

‘But you have your own plans for him, haven’t you?’

‘None at all.’

She gazed at me, showing her scepticism, using her charm.

‘You must have.’

‘I’m not sure how well you know him–’

Her expression didn’t alter, she was still intent on softening me.

‘–it would be about as much use my making plans for him as it would have been for your father. But I haven’t the faintest desire to, I haven’t had since he was quite young.’

I told her, when he was a child, I watched his progress obsessively from hour to hour. Then I dropped it, determined that I wouldn’t live my life again in him. Fortunately, now that I could see what he was really like. I didn’t tell her, but now for me he existed, just as she did, in his own right. Embossed, just as persons external to oneself stood out. Like that, except perhaps for the organic bonds, the asymmetry that had emerged for moments in the hospital bedroom.

‘That’s very splendid,’ said Muriel, ‘but still you’re not quite so simple as all that, are you?’

‘I’ve learned a bit,’ I said.

‘But you haven’t forgotten other things you’ve learned, I can’t believe it. I’ve heard my father say’ (by that she meant Azik Schiff, whereas a few minutes before I had been thinking of Roy Calvert) ‘that you know as much about careers as any man in England.’

She went on: ‘You won’t pretend, I’m sure you won’t, that you haven’t thought what Charles ought to do. And whatever it is, you know the right steps, you can’t get rid of what you’ve done yourself, can you?’

‘I might be some use to one or two of his friends,’ I said. ‘Such as Gordon Bestwick. But not to him.’

‘You’re being so modest–’

‘No, I know some things about him. And what I can do for him. After all, he’s my son.’

She said: ‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I love him.’

She was totally still. Sitting there, body erect in the chair, she seemed not to have moved an involuntary muscle, except for the play of smiles upon her face.

I wanted to say something emollient. I remarked: ‘I’ve told him, I shall make him financially independent at twenty-one. That’s the only thing I can do.’

Suddenly she laughed. Not subtly, nor with the curious, and not pleasing, sense of secret intention which she often gave: but full-throatedly, like a happy girl.

‘It really is extraordinary that that’s still possible today, isn’t it? Talk about justice!’

‘My dear girl, it would have seemed even more extraordinary forty-odd years ago, when I was Charles’ age, if someone had done the same for me.’

I explained that, until my first wife died, I had received exactly £300 which I hadn’t earned. And even that made a difference. Muriel was not in a position to talk, I told her, waving my hand to indicate the house in which we happened to be sitting. But now she didn’t resent being reminded about being an heiress. Somehow that exchange, singularly mundane, about riches, poverty, inherited wealth, had made us more friendly to each other.

Not at the instant when I heard her question about Charles, but soon after, I had realised that this was the point of the meeting. For some reason which she was hiding or dissimulating, it was to ask about his career that she had taken pains to get me to her house alone. Not for the sake of information, but to face me and what I wanted. Why she needed that so much, was still a mystery to me.

There was lack of trust on both sides, or something like a conflict or a competition, as though we were struggling over his future. I suspected that she intended to keep him close to their group, cell, movement, whatever they cared to call it: she had power over a good many young men, maybe she had power over him. I didn’t know whether she felt anything for him. Did she assume that I was playing a chess game with her, thinking some moves ahead to counter hers? If so, I thought, she was overrating herself.

Yet Muriel had faced me. Though there was nothing to struggle about, we had been struggling. Underneath the words, precise on her side, deliberately offhand on mine, there had been tempers, or feelings sharper than tempers, not hidden very deep. Now we were quieter.

‘He is very unusual,’ she said without explanation.

‘In some ways, yes.’ I had heard that opinion from his friends, as well as from her: it struck them more than it did me.

‘So it matters what he does.’

‘It will probably matter to him.’

We weren’t crossing wills: this was all simple and direct.

‘He is very unusual,’ she repeated. ‘So it might matter to others.’

‘Yes, if he’s lucky, so it might.’

28: Two Parties

CAMBRIDGE in May. Margaret and I walked through the old streets, then along Peas Hill, where in winter the gas flares used to hiss over the bookstalls. The gas flares would have looked distinctly appropriate that afternoon, for a north-west wind was funnelling itself through the streets, so cold that we were bending our heads, like the others walking in our direction: except for one imperturbable Indian, who strolled slow and upright, as though this was weather that any reasonable man would much enjoy. The clouds scurried over, leaden, a few hundred feet high. It was like being at Fenners long ago, two or three of us huddled in overcoats, waiting for ten minutes’ play before the rain.

Soon Margaret and I had had enough of it, and turned back. Cambridge in May. It was so cold that the early summer scents were all chilled down: even the lilac one could scarcely smell. We were staying with Martin (I had come up, as I promised Charles, to have a look at his friend Bestwick), and we hurried back to the tutorial house. There in his drawing-room we stood with our backs to the blazing coal fire, getting a disproportionate pleasure from the wintry comfort and the spectacle of undergraduates haring about in the wind and rain below.

We were not so comfortable in the early evening, when Charles, in order to produce Gordon Bestwick without making him suspicious, had arranged something like a party in Guy Grenfell’s rooms. It was the least lavish of parties. As I had noticed before, the young men and women drank very little, much less than their predecessors. Some of their friends smoked pot, and they didn’t condemn it, any more than they condemned anything in the way of sex. But they condemned racism, which had become, even to contemporaries of theirs who weren’t militant at all, the primal sin: which meant that when Grenfell, as a concession to the past, gave Margaret and me small glasses of otherwise unidentifiable sherry, one knew that it was not South African. Most of the group (it might have been because they intended to have a meeting that night, or even because Grenfell, who was well off, was also mean) contented themselves with beer or even the liquid emblem of capitalism, Coca Cola.

The room was on the ground floor, and very handsome: but it was also very cold. Before the war, there would have been a coal fire, as in Martin’s sitting-room: but now Grenfell’s college had installed central heating, and turned it off for the Easter term. I remarked to Bestwick, soon after I met him, that privileged living had become increasingly unprivileged, ever since I was a young man. Just in time to do him completely in the eye, he said, which pleased me, being less stark than I expected. Young men came in and out, sometimes meeting Margaret or me, usually not introduced. There were some good faces, one or two (as in any company of the political young that I had ever seen) with idealists’ eyes. There was plenty of character and intelligence moving through the room. A young woman, voice strained with distress, blamed me for Vietnam. One or two asked questions about Russia, which I knew, and China, which I didn’t: but were more interested in the second than the first. Charles March’s younger daughter passed by, and my niece Nina, who must have made a special trip from London. Someone spoke angrily about students’ rights.

It was no use speaking to the young as though you were young yourself. If you did, they distrusted you. Often they suspected you of a sexual motive: and they were sometimes right.

Students. They all called themselves students. Yet the term was scarcely heard in Cambridge when I first arrived there. They wouldn’t have been interested in that reflection. They were singularly uninterested in history. Not that that differentiated them much from other generations. We had all believed that we were unique: and these, as much as any.

Did anything differentiate them? On the surface, looks and manners. When one couldn’t see, or didn’t notice, their faces, some did look unlike anything this century. Guy Grenfell, for instance, grew his hair as long as a Caroline young man. Which seemed odd since his face had the port-wine euphoria, the feminine (but not effeminate) smoothness, of one of his eighteenth-century ancestors, and his manners once more struck me as strangely managed, as though he were determined to forget any he had ever known and was hoping to invent some for Year One, and to find the equivalence of citoyen and tovarishch. The result was not, as he presumably hoped, that he sounded like my forebears or Gordon Bestwick’s, but like his own at their most aggressive, on a foreign railway station in brazen voices hailing a porter.

But all that brushed off (if they were different, and they might be, it was because of their time and place) when I had a word with him alone, or later with Gordon Bestwick. Talking to Grenfell I felt obliged to bolster up his confidence. He was a nice and humble man, inconveniently torn between an embarrassing pride in his antecedents and the necessity of feeling more passionately modern than anyone around him. He wouldn’t have felt like that if he hadn’t been quite humble: he liked tagging on to people whom he believed with simplicity to be cleverer and better than he was. This led him to displays of exaggerated sensibility. His school had been ‘beastly and brutalising’. The mere thought of the army, his family profession, was beastly and brutalising too. He was very much preoccupied with the number of examination suicides at Cambridge, almost as though, frail plant that he was, he couldn’t expect both to pass his first-year Mays and to survive. In fact, he was a tough and hardy character, who didn’t need so much sympathy as he felt entitled to and modestly induced.

Whereas, in some respects, Gordon Bestwick needed more. With him, not long before Margaret and I were due to leave, I sat down on a window seat. Charles had had the intuition to guess that Bestwick and I would have something in common, and I had been told what to look for. Physically, he was gawky and tall, taller than Charles or Guy Grenfell, themselves over six feet, but he had not been as peach-fed as Grenfell; as he stretched out his legs, the thighs were thin, and there were deficiency lines from nostril to mouth. There were also other lines, premature furrows, on his forehead: his face was not exactly ugly, but plain, with wavy hair already thinning, hard intelligent eyes, square jowls. It was a physical make-up not uncommon in those whose temperament wasn’t easy to handle, what with natural force, ability, and a component of anxiety. It was the anxiety that Charles had asked me to watch; for Bestwick had been complaining, to Charles alone, of physical symptoms, and Charles had heard something of similar troubles of mine as a young man.

At that time I had been too proud to say a word. My first impression was that Bestwick was at least as proud. All I could risk was to let fall reminiscences about what it was like in my youth to be born poor. Charles had probably told him that I wasn’t stupid. It didn’t matter if he thought I was a bore. Reading for the Bar. Gambling on nothing going wrong. Strain. Lying awake at night. Sleep-starts. Pavements giving way underfoot. When the game looked in my hands, sent away ill.

If none of that applied to him (his expression was lively, but gave nothing away) he must have thought me a remarkably tedious conversationalist. Before we sat alone, he had been analysing the economic thinking of the old left. Informal, confident, not rude but dismissive. I thought I would test him. Sometimes the brightest demolition men weren’t so easy with the biological facts of life. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t anything much wrong with me. I recovered well enough to have my heart stop last November.’

He gave a grim friendly smile. ‘I heard about that,’ he said. ‘You look as though you’re hanging on all right, though. Aren’t you?’

He was treating me as an equal, that was good. It was just possible that psychosomatic recollections hadn’t been a bad idea. He might have been glad to hear that he wasn’t unique. I should have been glad of that, at his age.

We went on talking. An American black had been talking to a knot of admirers earlier on. Now they (American blacks), said Bestwick, were in a genuinely revolutionary situation. While the total of the United States society was nowhere near it, as far away as you could get. So that with Americans of student age, the counterparts of the people in this room, you had a revolutionary climate without a revolutionary situation. Had that ever occurred before?

He was worth listening to, I was thinking. Charles might have overestimated him, but not excessively. Perhaps his mind was not as precise as Charles’, which, as the mathematical analysts used to say, tended to be deep, sharp and narrow. Bestwick’s mind was certainly broader than Charles’, and possibly more massive. It was a pleasure to meet ability like this: a pleasure I used to feel, then for a time lost, and now had begun to enjoy again.

There was something else about him, quite minor, which interested me. His voice was pleasant, his tone was confident but unaggressive, but he hadn’t made any audible attempt to change his accent or his manner. If I hadn’t known his home town, I should still have guessed that he came from Birmingham or somewhere near. There were the intrusive g’s, ring-ging, hang-ging, which I used to hear when I travelled twenty miles west from home. In my time those would have gone. Except for the odd scientist like Walter Luke, people of our origins, making their way into the professional life, tried to take on the sound of the authoritative class. It was a half-unconscious process, independent of politics. Bestwick hadn’t made any such attempt. Yet he was a man made for authority. The social passwords had changed. Again it was a half-unconscious process. Perhaps he took it for granted that there wasn’t an authoritative class any more, or that it existed only in enclaves, bits and pieces. Curiously enough, I thought, that might not make things easier for him.

Just then Nina came up, smiled at me through her hair, and whispered to Gordon Bestwick. ‘When the party’s over, we’re all going to the Eagle. Is that OK for you?’

‘Fine,’ said Bestwick, and she slipped away. His eyes followed her, and he called out: ‘Mind you wait for me.’ It sounded masterful: was it as relaxed as when he talked to me?

I had not been told that those two knew each other. On the other hand, he must have been aware that she was a relative of mine. That might have made me more tolerable, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, when I said that Charles must bring him to stay with us at the end of term, he was eager, and less certain of himself than he had been at any time before.

Half an hour later, out at the Getliffes’ house, the level of comfort rose again. When we moved into the dining-room, the long table was not set for so many places as it often was: only for nine, which slightly took away from the normal resemblance to a Viking chieftain’s hall, that resemblance which was responsible for Charles naming it the Getliffe steading. We were used to the sight of Francis at one end of his table presiding over a concourse. That night, as it happened, besides Margaret and me, there were only Martin and Irene, who had followed us out from the college, the Getliffes’ second son Peter and his wife, and their elder son, Leonard. Francis was pushing decanters round, gazing down the table with an expression of open pleasure, just faintly tinged with saturnine glee. Everyone there knew each other. Martin and he had, after a good many years of guarded and respectful alliance, at last grown intimate. While Martin, before he and Francis became specially friendly, had long been fond of the Getliffe sons. And there was, as often in that house, something to celebrate. Leonard had been offered a chair in Cambridge, and one that even he, at the top of his profession, was pleased to get. How far he had recovered from his unrequited love, I didn’t know, and probably Francis didn’t. But he wasn’t migrating to Princeton after all, and Francis and Katherine, who liked their dynasty round them, were happy. Peter, settled in a university job, Ruth, the elder daughter, married to another don, now Leonard, persuaded to come back. That left only their youngest, Penelope, who was pursuing an erratic matrimonial course in the United States.

In the warm candlelight – one could hear windows rattling in the wind – Katherine was saying: ‘It’s funny, your Charles being so high (she put her hand below the table) and ours grown up.’

‘He’s taller than I am, dear,’ I replied, ‘and just about to take Part I.’

‘No! No! I meant, when you brought him here and Margaret put her foot in it, and that woman from Leeds thought you were a clergyman.’

Katherine was proceeding by free association: that was an occasion something like sixteen years before, though all the details were lost, certainly in my memory and Margaret’s, probably in that of the woman from Leeds, and were preserved only in Katherine’s. If you wanted to live outside of history, to dislocate time, then Katherine was the one to teach you: but, it happened very rarely, for once that total recall had slipped. At the time of this incident, Charles would have been about two. If so, Leonard, their oldest, had barely left school.

I pointed this out to Katherine, who expostulated, wouldn’t admit it, laughed, was disconcerted like an avant-garde American confronted by an example of linear thinking. Katherine’s thinking, I told her, was far from linear: then had to apologise, and explain with labyrinthine thoroughness (for Katherine didn’t easily subside) what the reference meant.

That led, transition by transition, to the party from which Margaret and I had come. Yes, we had been mixing with the local avant-garde: or the protesters: or the new left: or the anarchists: or the post-Marxists: they had all been there, all they had in common was the Zeitgeist, they wanted different things, they would end up in different places.

‘Oh well,’ said Francis, ‘that has happened before.’

I corrected myself, hearing him take it so facilely. Perhaps I had spoken like that too. I said that for some purposes, just at present they were at one.

Up and down the table, the others argued with me. There was one feature of that family party; on most issues, either of politics or social manners, we were, with minor temperamental shades, pretty well agreed. Irene had taken on most of Martin’s attitudes: Katherine had always been ready to believe that her husband was usually right. That wasn’t true of Margaret, certain of her own beliefs, which weren’t quite mine; she would have fitted better in an age when it was natural to be both liberal, or Whiggish, and also religious. Still in terms of action she was close to the rest of us.

As for the young Getliffes, there seemed next to nothing of the fathers-and-sons division. Even that family couldn’t invariably have been so harmonious: but certainly on politics they spoke like their father, or like other radicals from the upper middle class – not so committed as he had been, perhaps, but independent and ready to take the necessary risks. They were scientists like Francis, and that gave them a positiveness which sometimes made Margaret, and even me, wish to dissent. Nevertheless, those shades of temperament didn’t matter, and on the likely future and what ought to be done – the future of fate and the future of desire – there wouldn’t have been many dinner tables that night where there was less conflict.

Such conflict as did emerge was on a narrow front. The young Getliffes, both in their early thirties, were more cut off from Charles and his society, more impatient with them, than the rest of us.

‘It’s all romantic,’ said Leonard Getliffe at one point. ‘I’m not a politician, but they don’t know the first thing about politics.’

‘That’s not entirely true,’ I said.

‘Well, look. They think they’re revolutionaries. They also think that revolution has something to do with complete sexual freedom. They might be expected to realise that any revolution that’s ever happened has the opposite correlative. All social revolutions are puritanical. They’re bound to be, by definition. Put these people down in China today. Haven’t they the faintest idea what it’s like?’

That was a point I had to concede. I was thinking, yes, I had seen other groups of young people dreaming of both their emancipation and a juster world. That was how George Passant started out. Well, all, and more than all, of the emancipation he prescribed to us had realised itself – in the flesh – before our eyes. And we had learned – here Leonard was right – you can have a major change in sexual customs and still leave the rest of society (who had the property, who was rich, who was poor) almost untouched.

‘The one consolation is’, said Martin, ‘human beings are almost infinitely tough. If you did put them down in China, they’d make a go of it. I suppose if we were young today, we shouldn’t be any worse off than we actually were. They seem to find it pretty satisfactory.’

He might have been speaking of his son or, nowadays more likely, of his daughter.

‘Think of the time I should have had!’ Irene gave a yelp of laughter. Her husband laughed with her, troubles long dead, and so did the rest of us. One could have remarked that, considering the restrictions, her actual time had not been so uneventful.

Francis brought out a bottle of port, which nowadays we didn’t often drink. Sexual freedom apart, I asked them, did they think there was nothing else in this – assertion, unrest, rebellion, alienation, of the young, you could call it what you liked? It was happening all round the world. Yes, it might be helped by commercialism. Yes, it hadn’t either an ideology or a mass political base. But they (the Getliffes) were writing it off fairly complacently, they might be in for a surprise. Of course, if people of that age (I returned to something I had been thinking in Grenfell’s rooms) were different at all, it was nothing ultra-mundane, it was because of their time and place. But somehow their time was working on them pretty drastically. I wasn’t much moved by historical parallels. This was here and now. There were sometimes discontinuities in history. On a minor scale, we might be seeing one.

I didn’t find it necessary that, the previous summer, I should have been arguing on the Getliffes’ side, in the opposite sense. Well, I had changed my mind. As completely as all this? Perhaps my experience with young Pateman and his student following had prejudiced me against Charles’ friends, or perhaps I had overreacted to him. Anyway, these weren’t another crop of Lester Inces; some day I ought to tell Charles that there I had been wrong.

Most of the dinner party knew that I wasn’t detached, and that I was so interested because of my son. But Francis and Katherine had an affection for him, as well as for us. Martin and Irene too had their reasons for being interested. It was only the young couple and Leonard who were regarding the phenomenon as being a pure exercise in sociology. Since it was a cheerful evening, I didn’t suppress a gibe at the expense of Peter and his wife. They already had two children, five and three. A dozen years or so, and it would be their turn next. Either like this, or something different. Possibly stranger still.

That night at the dinner table, it was natural to think of Francis’ grandchildren a dozen years ahead. Francis’ life, at times strained, dissident, dutiful, had nevertheless held more continuity than most of ours. His father had lived not unlike this. His sons were already doing so. Though Francis’ hospitality was all his own, spontaneous and disconcerting to those who knew only his public face. That night he was in cracking spirits, talking of changes he had already seen, prepared to see more, jeering at himself and me for false prophecies, of which there had been plenty, gazing with astringent fondness at his family and friends. It was natural to think of that family going on.

While we were having our evening at the Getliffes, Bestwick and Charles and the others were at work. They were more active than we, or any of their predecessors, had been: or rather, we had talked a good deal but not acted, while they didn’t recognise any gap between the two. They weren’t ready to wait, as we had waited, until we had won a little, even the most precarious, authority. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they were getting down to business. They were doing so that night. Where in Cambridge they met I didn’t know, either then or later: nor what was decided, nor who took part. Charles had learnt discretion very early, and so I found had Bestwick, when I knew him better; neither of them at any stage told me, or even hinted at, anything I shouldn’t hear. It was only later, from another source, and a most unlikely one, that I could piece together fragments of the story.

29: Walking Slowly In the Rain

‘THE only examinations they’d heard of were medical ones. They weren’t very good at getting through those.’

It was Gordon Bestwick, talking of his family.

‘The same would be true of mine,’ I said. ‘I doubt if any one of them had ever taken a written examination until I did.’

Bestwick nodded his massive head, but he was faintly irked. He didn’t want me to be a partner in obscurity. He had been staying with us for a week, the first time, he said, that he had been inside a professional London home. It might have suited his expectations better if this had been more like my own first visits to the Marches, back in the twenties, butlers, footmen, wealth for generations on both sides. I had a feeling that he was disappointed that we lived so simply.

That evening he was sitting in our drawing-room after dinner, alone with Margaret and me. On the other days since Bestwick’s arrival, Charles had prompted me into having a series of guests to dinner, but that night he had some engagement of his own and had begged off. It was late in June, somewhere near the longest day, and the sky was like full daylight over the park.

‘Carlo didn’t suffer from the same disadvantage, though,’ he said.

‘If it was a disadvantage,’ I replied. ‘In some ways you and I may have had the better luck. He thinks so–’

‘And it’s like his blasted nerve. I don’t mind all that much his having been given ten yards start in a hundred, but when he gets explaining that it made things more difficult for him, that’s more than I can take.’

Margaret smiled. The two young men were more than allies, they were on comradely terms. Gordon was, so far as I had heard, the only one of Charles’ intimates who called him by his family pet name. But there was a mixture of envy and admiration which flowed both ways. Charles would have liked the dominance which he, and other acquaintances of ours older than he, couldn’t help feeling in Gordon. One didn’t have to be a talent spotter to recognise Gordon’s ability, that shone out: but I wondered whether there wasn’t something else. One or two chips bristled like iguana scales on his shoulders: but he managed to sink them, when he talked about those who really were deprived. He knew and cared. Privileged men were still vulnerable when they heard that kind of voice.

But those were times when Gordon was on duty. During his week with us, especially when he was talking to Margaret, one saw another aspect. He became attentive and anxious to please. Once or twice, trying to entertain her, he looked not mature, as he did addressing Hector Rose, but younger than his years.

In private Margaret told me that, though she liked him, she didn’t find him attractive as a man: and that she believed that would have been the same if she had been his own age. After that I asked Charles how Gordon got on with women. Charles reflected. Perhaps Gordon wasn’t his first choice for sexual confidences. ‘Oh,’ said Charles at length, ‘he’s a bit of a star, you know, he’s had one or two offers. Chiefly from very rich girls–’ Charles grinned. But Gordon, he went on, was pretty concentrated, he didn’t have much time to spare. The only girl in whom he seemed ‘interested’ (the peculiarly anaemic word which they used and which their more inhibited predecessors would have thought genteel) was Nina.

It was thundery, as Gordon sat in the drawing-room with us, and Margaret said she had a headache. I invited Gordon to come out for a drink. He looked hesitant as though we weren’t being solicitous enough or as though there were an etiquette in which he hadn’t been instructed. Margaret said Go on, it’ll do you good, and promised, in case Charles returned, to send him after us.

In the heavy air Gordon and I walked through the backstreets, as I had done with my stepson one Christmas Day. The clouds were thickening, but it hadn’t yet begun to rain, and outside a pub people were sitting round the open-air tables, at one of which Gordon and I settled down with pints of beer. Lightning flashes from the direction of the park. Growls of thunder far away. Close by the pavement kerb, cars, headlights shining in the murk, passed as on a conveyor belt on their way from Paddington.

It used to be a quiet pub, I remarked to Gordon, when I first lived in Bayswater Road. Now we might as well be sitting in a café in one of the noisier spots in Athens.

‘Never been abroad,’ he said, big frame relaxed, ingesting bitter. ‘Come off it, Gordon. We all know there is no sorrow like unto your sorrow. We also know that you could get large grants to travel any time you chose to ask for them. Which is more than I ever could. You’re rather inert physically and rather unadventurous, that’s all.’

He was used to some of my techniques by now, and gave a matey smile. I went on baiting him. He blamed too much on to environment and hoped for too much from environment. That had always been the mistake of romantic optimists. If he and his friends were going to hammer some sense into progressive thought, they had to dispose of that mistake. Gordon didn’t mind a challenge. He didn’t believe in any sort of Calvinism, scientific, intuitive or any other. The only thing you could change was environment. Change the environment of the working class – and he knew what the working class was like, he was born right there, he didn’t romanticise them, he didn’t want them to stay as they were – and they would become better.

Granted, I said: but what you could do by changing environment for anyone or any group of people had its limits.

We’ve got to believe that there are no limits, said Gordon.

In that case you’re in for another of the progressive disillusions.

If so, he said, we’ll all take that when we come to it: we’ve got to act as though we can make a new species.

You’ve got to act like that, but you mustn’t expect it.

It does good to expect the best.

There I wasn’t with him, I said. If you expect the best, then you’re blinding yourself to the truth.

Truth sometimes has to be put into suspended animation.

I don’t believe, I said, that you achieve good action – not for long – if the base is anything but true.

It was an old argument, but new facts were flooding in. He knew them as well as I did. He was an honest controversialist, ready to grope and brood. I had never had a great taste for argument, had lost what little I once had: but it was pleasant arguing with him. In the headaching night we drank more beer, talked on, heard from inside the pub the call of time, and then saw the first half-crowns of rain bombing the pavement.

‘We’d better hurry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to get wet.’

Running in bursts, sheltering under porticoes, lumbering, panting, we reached the main road. He was more mobile than I was, but not a track performer. The storm had broken, water was sploshing up to our shins. We made a last run to the block of flats. There, under cover of the doorway, we halted, so that I could get my breath.

‘Good God,’ said Gordon, pointing up the street towards Marble Arch. There was a solitary figure on the pavement, sauntering very slowly. When it passed into zones illuminated by the arc lamps, one saw it through lances of rain.

‘Carlo,’ said Gordon.

He came towards us, not altering his pace. Watching him, I caught a fresh smell of wet leaves, bringing peace.

When one saw his face, he was wearing a smile, as though satisfaction were brimming over from inside. For an instant I thought that he was drunk.

‘Hallo,’ he called, from a couple of yards away.

He was dead sober.

‘Christ, man,’ Gordon greeted him, ‘you’re wet through.’

It wouldn’t have been possible to be much wetter.

‘So I am,’ said Charles in a mild tone. He looked at us with something like affectionate surprise. He didn’t say any more, but his smile was pressing to return, and he didn’t restrain it.

About a fortnight after Gordon had returned home, in the middle of July, Charles insisted on treating Margaret and me to a show and taking us out to supper afterwards. The show had to be a film, since to him and his circle the theatre was an obsolete art form, which ought to have gone out with the Greeks or certainly with Shakespeare. The show also had to be a film he had seen before so that he could guarantee it. In the cinema he placed himself punctiliously between Margaret and me, whispering to her during the film, showing her an obsessive, and for him unusual, degree of filial attention.

Nothing was said that night. It was the next day, after tea, sitting with both of us in the drawing-room, when he said, quietly but with no introduction at all: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of moving into Chester Row. I’m sure you don’t mind, do you?’ He was speaking to Margaret, with whom his surface conflict had in the past flared up. ‘Of course you don’t mind, I shall be around, of course.’

‘Chester Row?’ she said in flat surprise.

‘Are you, by God?’ I said. I had a picture of him walking in the rain, the other night: slow, smile of joy, smell of wet leaves. I should never know whether I was right. Had he just come away from her? Was he retracing the history of the race? Did he feel that this was a unique achievement, that it had just been done for the first time?

‘When are you aiming to go?’ said Margaret, as though she were gripping on to practicalities.

‘As a matter of fact, if it doesn’t put anyone out, I was thinking of moving tonight.’

‘How long for?’

‘Indefinite.’ He gave her a smile, reassuring but secretive.

She began to speak and then thought better of it. Charles was giving out happiness, now that he had broken the news, but wasn’t willing to say another word about it. By a curious kind of understanding, almost formal, we all behaved as on the most uneventful of evenings. We looked at the television news at 5.50. Afterwards at dinner Charles made a fuss of his mother. The only references he made to his announcement were strictly practical. He didn’t want anyone at all, including Guy Grenfell, Gordon, his cousins (there were good reasons for that at least, I thought), to hear where he was living. He would collect letters every two or three days. As for telephone calls, we were to say that he was out but would ring back, and then pass the message on to Chester Row. He apologised for the nuisance, but it was necessary.

I didn’t enquire why. It was true that he often carried security precautions to eccentric lengths. If this had happened to me in comparable circumstances, I couldn’t help thinking, I should have been a good deal less self-denying and more boastful.

After dinner Margaret went with him to his room and helped him pack: which reminded me of one of my hypercivilised acquaintances doing precisely the same for her husband, each time he left her for a new girlfriend.

In the bright warm evening the three of us stood outside on the pavement, large suitcase standing beside Charles, waiting until a taxi came along. He waved to us from inside, and then we were left gazing as it joined the traffic stream to Marble Arch.

Back in the drawing-room, Margaret looked at me.

‘Well, that’s cool enough,’ she cried. She burst out into laughter, full, sisterly, sensual.

I hadn’t been sure what she was feeling: at that moment, she was feeling exactly as I was, it wasn’t just a fatherly response, she shared it. Nothing subtle, just pleasure, the warmth of sexual pleasure at second hand. Mixed with approval that he didn’t lack enterprise. But mainly we were getting what, if you wanted to be reductive, you could think of as a voyeuristic joy. That was there: but it wasn’t quite all: it wasn’t quite so self-centred as that. It wasn’t in the least lofty, though. We were animals happy about another animal. And to parental animals, the happiness was rich.

In that sense Margaret – and it surprised me a little – felt as I did. If this had been a daughter? No, there was a disparity one couldn’t escape. I was certain that I should have been miserable. Perhaps there would have been some sexual freemasonry underneath, but worry would have overwhelmed it. I supposed that would have been true, and presumably more true, of Margaret also.

After a time, in which we had taken an evening drink, Margaret became more pensive.

‘I don’t think this is going to be good for him, you know.’

‘Oh well. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been another.’ That sounded platitudinous and non-controversial, but it provoked Margaret.

‘But it is her. You can’t brush that away.’

‘He might have done worse, in some ways–’

‘I don’t like her.’

‘I’ve told you before, I don’t like her either.’

‘You like her a lot more than I do,’ said Margaret. ‘She’s a cold-hearted bitch.’

I didn’t remind Margaret that once she had been a partisan of Muriel’s and had tried to look after her.

‘You’re not going to pretend, are you,’ she burst out, ‘that she’s in love with him?’

‘Does that matter?’

‘Of course it matters. Do you think it’s good to have your first affair with someone who doesn’t give a damn for you?’

‘My impression was, she had some feeling for him. I don’t understand what it is.’

‘She’s five years older.’ Margaret had flushed, her eyes were bright with temper. ‘You all say she’s attractive to men, she could have her pick, unless there’s something wrong with her. Why in God’s name should she throw herself at him? What has he to offer her? He’s too young. I could understand it perhaps if he were her own age, then he might be a good prospect–’

She went on: ‘I tell you, I can’t understand it. Unless – there are just two reasons why she might be doing it. And neither of them is very pleasant.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, she might be one of those women who like seducing boys. That would be bad for anyone like him–’

‘It’s possible.’ I stopped to think. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was likely, though. I haven’t heard her talk about his being young. I doubt if she thinks of him like that.

‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘I’d guess that he’ll soon be able to look after himself in that sort of way.’

‘If it’s not that,’ she said, ‘it’s something worse. She’s determined to get him to herself. Away from us. So that she can fix him right inside that wretched movement of theirs. And she’s chosen the one certain way to fix him.’

I had already thought something not unlike that myself: this might be the second stage of the struggle. In that case, she had all the advantages.

‘Are you happy about that?’ Margaret was distressed by now: and, as often happened, her distress turned into anger.

‘No.’

‘Do you want him to waste himself?’

‘You might remember, that I’m not responsible for any of this. Just because I’ve said one word in her favour–’

Margaret broke into a guilty smile, then hardened again.

‘But he may be wasting himself you can’t deny it, can you? If she gets control of him, and makes him sink himself in this nonsense, then he could be a casualty, of course he could. To begin with, if that takes up all his time, his work is going to suffer.’

‘He’s pretty tough, you know. And he likes doing well. I really do doubt if that will happen.’

‘Anyway, it’s a waste of anyone like him. He ought to be thinking of something worthwhile. If he spends his energy on something which anyone of his sense ought to see is useless, and worse than useless, then he can do himself harm. Whatever he wants to do later. It’ll take him a long time to recover. Just because this woman has got hold of him.’

I hadn’t any answer which satisfied either of us. She was exaggerating, I said, she was making Charles out to be weaker than he was; she was leaving out all that he would do, if Muriel didn’t exist. But none of that was comforting. She had made me apprehensive, as I hadn’t been for a long time: in a fashion which I had become released from, the future was throwing its shadows back.

30: Daughter-In-Law

OUR housekeeper, getting it both ways, mourned the departure of the last young presence from the flat and simultaneously showed robust Mediterranean enthusiasm for its cause. When Charles, becoming punctilious towards her as to Margaret, telephoned to say that he would call on us for a meal, he was welcomed by his favourite dishes. This happened regularly twice a week throughout the late summer; Charles came in at six, talked cheerfully through dinner without mentioning Muriel or his way of life, and left at ten. He did take care to dispel one of Margaret’s qualms. Yes, he was working: he was too much conditioned not to, he said, teasing her over the exploits of her academic grandfather and uncles. Their reading parties! He was prepared to bet that he did more work by himself than they did smoking their pipes, taking marathon walks, cultivating personal relations and revering G E Moore.

All was serene, on the plane of conversation. It was harder for her than for me to accept that most of his existence she couldn’t know.

Then, soon after he had returned to Cambridge for the Michaelmas term, she had news of her other son. It was in the middle of an October afternoon when, reading in the study, I heard the doorbell ring. Moments afterwards it rang again, long and irritably. No one was responding. I got up and went to open the door myself.

There, on the landing, stood Father Ailwyn, bulky, white face shimmering over black cassock. He didn’t smile: he moved his weight from one foot to the other.

I asked him to come in. His awkwardness infected me. I wasn’t fond of uninvited visitors: and also he was one of those of whom I thought kindly when he wasn’t there – and uneasily when he was. And yet, I had a regard for him after that talk – or interrogation – in the hospital.

As I led him into the drawing-room, neither of us spoke. When he was sitting down, light falling on the pale plump face, which might have looked lard-like if his growth of beard, clearly visible after the morning shave, hadn’t been so dark and strong, he was still mute. Then we managed to exchange words, but his tongue seemed as thick as it usually did, and mine more so.

My first attempt was an enquiry about his parish.

‘It doesn’t alter much,’ he replied.

Stop.

I tried to repeat something I had read about an ecumenical conference.

‘No, I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

After that he felt that an effort was up to him. Suddenly he asked, with exaggerated intensity, about my eye. I said, all had gone well.

‘Is it really all right?’

‘It’s got some useful sight. That’s the best that they could promise me.’

I closed the good eye. ‘I can see that you’re sitting there. I might just be able to recognise you, but I’m not sure.’

‘Very good. Very good.’ His enthusiasm was inordinate, but that was where it ended. Silence again.

He stared at me, and broke out: ‘Actually, I was hoping to see your wife.’

That seemed not specially urbane, even by his standards. Still, it was a diversion, and I went to find her. She was in the bedroom, sitting at her dressing table in front of the mirror, having not long come back from her hairdresser. I told her that Godfrey Ailwyn was asking for her, and that she had better come and take the weight off me.

But, after they had shaken hands, the weight was not removed. His eloquence was not perceptibly increased. There were now two people for him to gape at awkwardly, instead of one. Margaret, who had had some practice at making conversation, found the questions falling dead.

Ignoring her, Father Ailwyn looked straight and soberly at me.

‘I think’, he said, ‘I ought to speak to Margaret by herself’

She gave me a baffled glance as I went out. I was more than baffled, as I sat alone in the study. I had no premonition at all about what he had come to tell her.

It was not long, not more than a quarter of an hour, before Margaret opened the study door.

‘You’d better come back now,’ she said. She was looking flushed and strained, her eyes so wide open that the lids seemed retracted.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s about Maurice.’

‘Is he ill?’ My thoughts had flashed – not because I had ever imagined it of him, but because of a groove of experience – to suicide.

‘Nothing like that.’

I was standing by her, and had put my arm round her. She went on: ‘No. He’s going to get married.’

‘Oh well–’ I was beginning to laugh it off, when she broke in: ‘To someone who is handicapped.’

‘What does that mean?’

She shook her head, and moved like someone impelled to hear a verdict, towards the drawing-room.

Rising as she entered, Godfrey Ailwyn was clumsy as ever on his feet, but more comfortable, and more authoritative, now that he had done his duty. From their first remark I gathered that he had delivered a letter from Maurice; I wasn’t given this to read until later, but it was full of love for Margaret and explained that, though he knew this would cause difficulties and disappointments for her, he proposed to marry someone whom he ‘might be some good to’. The wedding and all the arrangements would have to be ‘very simple and private’ because she wasn’t ‘used to these things and mustn’t be frightened or given too much to cope with’. Godfrey Ailwyn knew all the circumstances and would be able to discuss what should be done.

With Godfrey resettled in his chair, I picked up most of this, and another piece of information, which was that the girl was the sister of a patient in the hospital where Maurice worked.

Margaret was looking at me. There was a question which had to be asked.

‘Is she mentally affected?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You’re not keeping anything from us?’

‘Lewis,’ he replied, ‘you needn’t have said that.’

He was both stern and wounded, and I apologised.

‘Well then, what is wrong with her?’

I didn’t know how much Margaret had discovered. I had better make certain.

‘She has a limp. It looks like the kind of limp that polio leaves them with, but I believe she’s always had it.’

‘Is it very bad?’

‘One is aware of it. Perhaps it’s more distressing to others than to herself. I think, taken alone, no, it is not very bad.’

‘Taken alone? You mean there’s something else?’

‘She is also partially deaf,’ said Godfrey. ‘I think that is congenital too, and she has never had normal hearing. Of course, that made her backward as a child. But mentally she has caught up. I mustn’t give you the impression that she is brilliant. There is nothing wrong with her there, though. What is more serious is that being deaf kept her out of things. She is very uncertain of herself, I doubt if she has ever made friends. And that is why Maurice has changed everything for her.’

‘Is that what he means’, said Margaret, voice tight, ‘when he says she’s handicapped?’

‘That is what he means.’

‘And that is all he means?’ I pressed him.

‘That is all he means.’

‘You’re certain? You do know her?’

‘I know her. She is staying at the Vicarage now.’

‘Then I can see her?’ Margaret broke out.

‘I’m afraid not, Margaret,’ said Godfrey in a gentle tone, but with cumbrous strength.

‘Why not?’

‘Maurice thinks we must make everything easy for her. And he knows more about the unlucky, and how to help them, than any of the rest of us will ever know.’

‘But I must see her. This is his whole future.’

‘Margaret, your son is trying to lead a good life. I don’t believe you could alter that, but I beg you to listen to me, you mustn’t let him see that it brings you pain.’

Godfrey was speaking to her as though I was not present. After all, Maurice was not my son. Maybe that was why Godfrey, giving the impression of bumbling incivility, first insisted on telling the news to her alone. He was her son, not mine. And Godfrey – one had to remember – did not approve of divorce.

‘I wish’, said Margaret, her eyes bright with tears held back, ‘that he was leading a life like everyone else.’

‘If I were you,’ Godfrey replied, ‘I should wish the same. But I don’t think it would be right, do you?’

‘I can’t be sure. For his sake, I can’t be sure.’

My own feeling might have been different from hers, certainly was different from Godfrey’s. But this wasn’t a time to speculate. Godfrey was continuing to tell us more about her. She was, he thought, a ‘nice person’ (which, at that moment, seemed one of the flatter descriptions). She was twenty-three, the same age as Maurice. It was not until that point that I learned her name. That may have been true of Margaret also, for Maurice had not mentioned it in his letter. It was, Godfrey said in passing, Diana Dobson. He believed that in her family she was called Di.

‘You must remember,’ Godfrey told Margaret, ‘she comes from the very poor. Her mother is a cleaner in a factory. The father left them long ago. They are as poor and simple as they come. I’m afraid that’s another difficulty for you–’

Margaret flared up.

‘Do you think that would make the slightest difference to me?’

She was angry, seizing a chance to be angry. Godfrey gazed at her with a sad, doughy smile. He said: ‘Without meaning to let it, and feeling bad in the sight of God, I have to confess that it always makes a difference to me.’

He must have been speaking of his visiting round in the parish. Maurice once told me that, when he went as companion, he usually enjoyed it, but Godfrey almost never.

Margaret’s expression changed. All of a sudden she was open and naive, as few people saw her. She said, as though it was the natural reply: ‘I am sorry, Godfrey. I know you’re a good man.’

‘No.’ Heavily he shook his head. ‘I wish I could be. It’s your son who is a good man.’

He added: ‘I’d often hoped that he’d become a priest. It would be the right place for him. But now there’s this marriage instead–’

I was thinking, Godfrey strongly disapproved of divorce: the only thing he disapproved of more strongly was marriage. At least for himself and his friends. No, that was unfair. But it was the kind of unfairness – or slyness or malice if you like – that showed that I was becoming fonder of him.

He and Margaret got down to business. Maurice had given instructions which weren’t to be departed from. There were to be no press announcements of the engagement: and none of the wedding, except for a single notice in the Manchester evening paper, for the sake of Diana’s relatives. No announcements. He would write himself to his friends. (Why all this?) However his friends might behave in other situations, here he could have trusted them: Charles and all the rest would have set out to welcome her. That was part of their creed. They would be far kinder than, in the past, my circle would have been. Yet Maurice was being excessively cautious, like Charles but unlike himself, or anything that he had written to his mother or told to Godfrey: acting – it was hard to believe – as though he were ashamed of it.

The wedding was to be in Godfrey’s church, in a fortnight’s time. Here – and this was entirely understandable, for as Godfrey said, it was in order not to harass the girl – there was to be no one invited, except a cousin of Diana’s to give her away.

Very quietly Margaret said: ‘Am I not to come?’

‘He thought she might be more panicky–’

‘No.’

Margaret’s tone was level, unemphatic. ‘I shall come. I can sit at the back of the church.’

She did go. I offered to go with her, but she refused. When she returned – the wedding had been early in the morning, and it was not yet eleven o’clock – her expression would to others have seemed controlled.

‘That’s done,’ she said.

She sat on the sofa, smoking, not looking at me.

‘You know, one always imagines what one’s children’s weddings will be like. Do you do that about Carlo’s?’

‘No, never.’

‘Perhaps it’s a mother’s privilege.’ For an instant, her tone was sharp-edged. Then she went on: ‘I’ve imagined all sorts of weddings for Maurice. I haven’t told you, but I have. So many women would have married him, wouldn’t they? But I never imagined anything like this.’

I asked something pedestrian, but she didn’t hear.

‘He looked very nice. Very handsome. I think he was happy. No, I’m certain he was happy. I used to tell myself, all I wanted was for him to be happy.’

Had she met the girl? Oh yes, Maurice had brought her (Margaret) into the vestry. She and the best man were the witnesses. There had been one other person, a stranger, in the church: not Maurice’s father, who had sent flowers and a cheque.

What was the girl like – the question wanted to come out, but I hesitated. Margaret didn’t need to hear it. She said: ‘She’s almost pretty.’

She added: ‘She wanted to say something to me, but she could hardly get out a word.’

After a moment, still not letting go: ‘I wanted to say something to her, but I wasn’t much better.’

Three weeks later, I was able to see Maurice’s wife for myself. He brought her to tea one afternoon, and trying to settle her down and to smooth away her shyness (and our own), Margaret and I complained heartily of the misty weather, and made a parade of drawing the curtains and shutting the evening out.

‘Oh, never mind,’ said Maurice, entirely serene. ‘It’ll be worse where we live, won’t it, darling?’

His wife didn’t reply, but she understood, and gave a dependent, trusting smile. I was thinking, as she sat in the armchair, turning towards him, Margaret’s description wouldn’t have occurred to me. She hadn’t a feature which one noticed much, but she wasn’t, either in the English or the American sense, homely. Often she wore the expression, at the same time puzzled, obstinate, and protesting that one saw in the chronically deaf. How deaf she was, I couldn’t tell. Maurice spoke to her with the words slowed down, deliberately using the muscles of his lips, and she seemed to follow him easily. Sometimes he had to interpret for Margaret or me.

She was wearing a nondescript brown frock. But, as well as her limp catching the eye, so did her figure. Standing still, she looked shapely and trim.

We should have had to quarry for conversation if it hadn’t been for Maurice: but he took charge, like an adoring young husband acting as impresario. Each time he spoke to her, she smiled as though he had once more called her into existence.

Yes, they had a place to live in. They were buying a three-bedroom house in Salford, so that Di’s mother could live with them. I knew about this in principle, for as our wedding present Margaret and I had paid the deposit. Maurice would continue at his job at the mental hospital. Di would earn some money, typing at home.

‘We shall manage, shan’t we?’ he said to her, with his radiant unguarded smile.

‘If we can’t,’ she said, ‘we shall have to draw in our horns.’ When she spoke to him, her tone was transmuted: it became not only confident and trusting, but also matter of fact.

All that we could learn about her, through the deafness (our voices sounded more hectoring as we tried to get through, the questions more inane), was that she was utterly confident with Maurice, and not in the least surprised that he had married her.

I did manage to have one exchange with her, but it couldn’t have been called specially illuminating. I had been casting round, heavy-footed, for gossip about the Manchester district. I happened to mention the United football team. Her eyes suddenly brightened and became sharp, not puzzled: she had heard me, she gave a sky-blue recognising glance. Yes, she liked football. She supported the United. There wasn’t a team like them anywhere. She used to go to their matches – ‘until I met him’. It was the first time she had referred to Maurice without directly speaking to him, and they were both laughing. ‘I’m not much good to you about that, am I?’ said Maurice, who had no more interest in competitive games than in competing at anything himself.

In time, it had seemed a long time, Maurice got up and said: ‘Darling, we shall have to go. Old Godfrey will miss us at the service. You know, there mightn’t be anyone else.’

They had a little church backchat to themselves. I had never been certain whether Maurice was a believer, or just a fellow-traveller. The girl seemed to be devout. Then they got up, and Margaret went towards her and embraced her. Looking at Maurice, she stood uncertain, not knowing which way to go, while I in turn approached and laid my cheek against hers.

When we heard the lift door close, Margaret sat down again and sighed. After a while, she said: ‘Tell me, Lewis’ (actually she used a pet name which meant that she needed me) ‘is that a real marriage?’

‘I haven’t the remotest idea.’

‘No, I want to know what you think?’

‘For what my guess is worth,’ I said, ‘I’d say that it probably was.’

‘It would be a consolation, if I were certain of that.’

As she had told Godfrey, she wanted Maurice to be like everyone else: or as near like as he could come. Perhaps she was thinking, as she did later, about the nature of goodness. He was behaving, as he so often did, in a way which would have been impossible for most of us. If behaviour was the test, then he did good, and most of us didn’t. Margaret and I had often agreed, behaviour was more important than motive. And yet she, as a rule less suspicious than I was, had her moments of suspicion about this son she loved. Was it too easy for him to be good? Was it just an excuse for getting above, or out of, the battle? Did he really feel joyous and whole only with those who were helpless?

She didn’t ask me, because she felt that I was likely to be hard. In fact, I shouldn’t have been. There was something, I should have said, in what she suspected. He might even desire a woman only when she was disabled and had him alone to turn to. That was why, incidentally, I was ready to believe that his was a real marriage. But also, not in terms of desire but of well-being, he might be at his best himself only when he was with the unlucky and the injured. But that was true of everyone who had his kind of goodness. Did that make it less valuable? Maybe yes. It depended whether you were going to give any of us the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, I thought, when I was a young man, if I had met Maurice and my nephew Pat, I should have been hypnotised by Pat’s quick-change performances and attributed to him depths and mysteries which he didn’t in the least possess. Whereas I shouldn’t have been more than mildly interested in Maurice and should have said that you couldn’t behave like that if you were a man.

After having seen more people, nowadays I should be much more sceptical about my ‘explanation’ of either of them: but I shouldn’t be in the least sceptical of one thing, which was which of the two I preferred to have close by. Virtue wore well after all.

31: A Practical Joke?

THERE weren’t many dates which Margaret and I celebrated: there was one that November which I couldn’t celebrate with her. The twenty-eighth. First anniversary. For her it meant nothing but pain and extreme isolation – the hospital waiting-room, the dead blank, no news. She didn’t wish to be reminded. So I called in at my club and, avoiding friends and acquaintances, stood myself a drink.

That was the most private of celebrations. After all, it had been the most private of events.

I knew by now, not that it was a surprise, that traumas didn’t last in their first efficacy. This trauma didn’t keep me immune from hurt, as it had done for a time, when I had only to recall the date and bring back oblivion. One’s character and one’s nature weren’t so easily modified or tamed. Traumas weren’t so magical as that. And yet, they weren’t, or this one wasn’t, quite unavailing, and the effect took some time to fade right away. Not always but often I could ride over disappointments and worries, just as people more harmonious than I was had been able to do, without effort, all their lives.

That autumn (it hadn’t always been so) Margaret was worrying more about Maurice than I was about Charles. Walking alone in the park I wasn’t thinking of what he used to say to me when he accompanied me. Which added to my well-being and perhaps if he had known, to his.

After Maurice’s visit with his wife, Margaret heard of them only by letter. And it was not until December, when his term had ended, that we had a sight of Charles. He called on us ostensibly to pick up letters, but really to invite us to dinner the following week at Chester Row.

As we got ready to go, we hadn’t an inkling of what to expect. Margaret said it was like going out when she was a young woman, not on terms with social occasions. She was trying to dissemble that she was more than a little tense. When we arrived, we might not have known what to expect: but, whatever we had expected, it wouldn’t have borne any resemblance to this.

The housekeeper, beaming, took our coats from us in the bright hall. ‘Mrs Calvert wonders if you would mind going straight up to the drawing-room, Lady Eliot.’ Inside which, the first thing we saw was Azik Schiff, sitting on the sofa, looking unusually subdued. Muriel came towards us. ‘I’m so very pleased you could come, Aunt Meg,’ she said, giving us formal kisses. She was wearing a long frock, so that Margaret appeared distinctly underdressed: and, I noticed by a sideways glance, so did Rosalind, who was installed in an armchair. I wondered how long it was since Rosalind had gone out to dinner and found herself underdressed.

‘You’ll both probably have Scotch, won’t you?’ said Charles standing beside Muriel, polite and decorous in a dark suit. Though he and Muriel drank so little, they had provided for all our tastes: both Azik and Rosalind had been given Campari, presumably from domestic knowledge acquired by Muriel. As though to make us feel at home, which was the last thing any of their guests were feeling, Charles joined us in taking a whisky, which must have been another display of courtesy.

Two sofas, three armchairs, made an enclave at the street end of the long room. Muriel disposed us and then sat in one of the armchairs, utterly composed, like one presiding over a salon. Charles took his place near to the shelf of drinks: just once I thought or fancied I caught a flashing dark-eyed glance.

They each asked host-like questions, but the conversation didn’t flow. Margaret, trying to sound easy, remarked that the room was nice and warm. Yes, said Muriel, the heating system was efficient. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘we both like it a little cooler. But it was a case of majority opinion, we thought. So we stepped it up five degrees. I do hope that was right?’

Her eyes fixed themselves earnestly on her mother, then came back to Margaret. Nothing could have been more thoughtful or made them more uncomfortable. ‘Don’t mind about me,’ said Rosalind, out of countenance. ‘Of course we mind about you,’ said Muriel in a clear voice. An instant of silence. Up in the square, the church clock struck once: it must have been a quarter to eight.

‘How quiet it is here,’ I remarked, thinking it was not the most brilliant of conversational openings. Charles said: ‘At the weekends’ (this was a Saturday night), ‘we might as well be living in a small country town.’

I didn’t have the presence of mind to enquire when he had ever lived in a country town, small or otherwise. Azik made a contribution, standard Mitteleuropa, not Azik’s own uninhibited self, about the charms, the variety, the changes every quarter-mile, the village shopping streets, of London.

It went on like that, after we moved downstairs to the dining-room. I sat on Muriel’s right, Azik on her left, Rosalind next to me, Margaret next to Azik, Charles at the head of the table.

‘Six is the easiest number, isn’t it?’ Muriel said with demure pleasure.

The food was excellent, soup, grouse, a savoury. They had acquired some good claret, such as Azik and I might have provided. It was all as formal as any small dinner-party we were likely to go to. In fact, it was appreciably more formal, since not many of our friends had the domestic help for this kind of entertaining, nor the peculiar deadpan style which Muriel found natural and which, that night at least, it amused Charles to adopt. It all seemed – would they have done this for anyone else’s benefit? – like an elaborate, long-drawn-out practical joke: the kind of joke in which Muriel’s father used to involve himself, so that sometimes it looked as though he had forgotten that it was a joke at all.

The conversation round the dinner table was stylised also. Azik and Charles had an exchange about Asian politics, on which Azik was knowledgeable because of his business. They might have been meeting for the first time. Neither gave much away about his political opinions, or whether he had any opinions whatever. Enquiries about Muriel’s child, not fended off, politely replied to: yes, he was bright and flourishing. Enquiries from me about Charles’ friends: those were fended off, though Charles gave an amiable smile as he did so. The only direct talk, propriety for once relaxed, came when Azik produced the precious, the inevitable topic of his son. Next October, 1967, David would be going to his public school. They had finally decided on Westminster: despite all their resolves, they couldn’t let him go away from home: he might win a scholarship (‘certain to,’ said Charles with professional competence), but even so he would enter as a day boy. For a while Azik’s parental passion dominated the table and the family relations spread among us all. At the end of the meal, however, we had returned to a discussion of jewellery.

Then Muriel gazed along the table towards Charles.

‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘will you bring the others up when you’re ready?’

‘Of course,’ said Charles.

Margaret gave me a stupefied glance before she went with the other two women out of the dining-room. Now I felt sure that this evening must have been prepared for, though it seemed due more to Muriel’s sense of – humour? mischief? even impudence? than to Charles’. He might have thought up a charade, but he wouldn’t have carried it so far. He might have considered that last touch inartistic. He knew as well as anyone there that Margaret and I had never separated men from women after dinner since we set up house. Nevertheless, still grave and decorous, he apologised to Azik and me for not being able to offer us port; could we make do with brandy?

Until we left, I didn’t hear an intimate word spoken. Chat when the party re-formed in the drawing-room, Charles having kept us below for a precise fifteen minutes. Chat admirably tailored for a dinner party in a remote diplomatic mission, third secretary and wife doing their duty by elderly compatriots. Once Rosalind asked her daughter: ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ – where the ‘you’ was intended to be in the singular.

‘Oh,’ said Muriel, ‘we shall have a quiet time, I expect; we shan’t be going away.’ She contrived to make their ménage sound remarkably like the end of Little Dorrit. Occasionally their eyes met. Otherwise they behaved, not only as though they were safely married, but as though they had been so for a long time.

Glances at watches. Goodbyes. Margaret unusually effusive with thanks for a delightful evening. Ritual of gratitude. Ritual of kisses. Margaret and I back home by eleven o’clock.

The departure of their guests so early might have suggested to Muriel and Charles that the party had not been an uproarious success. Presumably that wasn’t weighing on their spirits. And yet, as with so many of Muriel’s father’s exploits, there was a faint, an almost imperceptible doubt. It was a thousand to one against – but what if they had been serious? What if they had been to obsessive trouble and given their first dinner party?

In that case, said Margaret, tender to the embarrassments of the young, it would have been a major disappointment. She didn’t believe it: but she didn’t utterly and absolutely disbelieve it. I laughed at her, and wasn’t unaffected myself. Muriel had a gift for disquiet, I thought: that is, she stayed still and here were we, more mystified about them both than we had been before.

We were not the only people who were mystified that night. Two days later, on the Monday afternoon, Azik’s secretary telephoned me. Mr Schiff would be very grateful if I could spare him a few minutes. When? Straight away, if I could manage it: otherwise – Yes, I was doing nothing, I said, I would come round. Mr Schiff will send a car for you. That wasn’t necessary. Oh, Mr Schiff insists –

Mr Schiff did insist, just as Lord Lufkin used to, and as in Lord Lufkin’s time I was driven in a Daimler to the office. Driven in state for something like eight hundred yards. For Azik, like other tycoons, had moved his office westwards, into the Park Lane fringe of Mayfair, and now inhabited a mansion which in the nineteenth century had been the town house of a Whig grandee. All, including the car, was as sumptuous as Lord Lufkin’s accoutrements used to be: thick carpets on the office floors, Regency decorations restored, regilded. There was just one difference. Of these two, Azik was by far the more outpouring: which wasn’t saying much, since very few men were less outpouring than Lufkin. In fact, Azik was lavish by any standard, his tastes were exuberant, as witness his house in Eaton Square. Yet Lufkin’s personal office had reminded one of the Palazzo Venezia in one of the Duce’s more expansionist phases: whereas Azik’s office in Hertford Street, which I had not visited before that day, must have been something like a closet or at best a dressing-room in the old mansion, much smaller, darker, more shut in than the room of his own secretary, and, apart from a desk and a couple of chairs, almost totally unequipped.

There were no offers of tea, drinks, or even cigarettes. Azik did all his hospitality at home. He shook my hand, and immediately asked: ‘I wanted to hear, what do you think of our young friends?’

‘I suppose you knew about them?’

I meant, did he know, before Saturday night, that they were living together. Azik laid a finger to the side of his nose.

‘My dear Lewis, what do you take me for?’

As a matter of historical fact, it had not required superhuman acumen or any other quality with which I was willing to credit Azik. Muriel had, for some purpose of her own, first raised her mother’s suspicions and then, after various misdirections, had gone into a fit of apparent absent-mindedness and told her.

‘They have presented us with a fait accompli, I should say,’ Azik put it like a question. ‘I don’t understand why they wish to remind us of it, do you?’

That was only one of the things I didn’t understand, I said. Including the whole situation.

Azik nodded.

‘The only certain feature of that situation is that it won’t stand still.’ He went on, he’d never known a situation with a woman which did stand still, until he married Rosalind: and not always then. He spoke with a shamefaced smile, not so unquenchably the hypermasculine or the Jewish papa.

Then he said: ‘Your son is a lucky young man, shouldn’t you say?’

‘Is he?’

‘He loves her, of course. He’d be very hard to please if he didn’t. Believe me, I know more about the girl than you do. He’s very lucky to love and find everything teed up. We didn’t have so much luck, you and I, my friend.’

I said yes. I was thinking – me at Charles’ age, walking the town streets, virgin, craving, about to fall in love without return. As for Azik at that age, I knew nothing: it must have been about the end of Weimar, he might perhaps have been wondering whether he would have the chance, not to love, but simply to live.

‘Well then,’ said Azik. ‘It would be more of a blow to him if she dropped him. And if you’ll listen to me, I have to assure you, that might happen.’

I had a sudden sense of affront, that he should suggest Charles was going to be ill-treated in love. If he said it about me, well and good – so that I was more offhand than I need have been, when I replied: ‘It has happened to better men than him.’ I went on: ‘But I’ve seen no sign of it. Have you? Have you heard anything?’

Azik slowly shook his great head. There was a long pause, as though he were hesitating whether to speak or alternatively was reorganising his case. With the apologetic air of one putting a probing amendment, he said: ‘How would you regard it if they got married?’ I wasn’t prepared. I blurted out: ‘He’s far too young–’

‘As far as that goes, he is grown up. He has grown up very fast. But I didn’t mean now, my friend. Not yet. Not yet.’

‘I haven’t given it a thought.’ That wasn’t true. It had passed through my mind as a possibility, one that seemed unlikely and that I didn’t like.

‘Perhaps you might some day.’ He gave me a cheerful, watchful, evaluating glance. Another pause. ‘I should say, there would be no objection from our side. My side.’ (Was that a correction? Did Rosalind, as I could well believe, disagree with him? Was that why we were meeting in his office?) ‘There would be no objection. No, I should welcome it.’

‘Oh well, there’s no hurry,’ I said, playing for time.

‘I want her to have a good life. She mustn’t make another mistake. That was a disaster, the last one. But this time she has chosen something worth while.’ He broke into a grin.

‘I must say, she is making a habit of being covered by members of your family.’ He had been speaking of his stepdaughter with genuine fondness, something like the affection of the flesh: he was still doing so, though I hadn’t expected that last remark.

He went on: ‘I couldn’t have chosen better for her if she’d asked me, this time. You have a fine boy there.’

‘So have you with yours.’ That was tactical. I wanted to break the conversation up.

‘We have both been luckier than we deserve. Oh yes, David will give me something to live for when I’m an old man. And your Charles is a blessing too.’ The mention of his son hadn’t distracted him for long. He said: ‘You needn’t wonder why my girl is in love with him.’

‘I don’t wonder. I doubt it. I don’t know.’

‘I tell you, Lewis, I do know. I know her. She puts on a front, she wears a mask, she drives you mad. But she feels without anyone seeing. I know. I know because she used to feel for me. She is in love with him.’

This was the direct opposite of anything that Margaret or I had thought. How much did Azik believe it? He was out to persuade me, he did it with fervour. Of course, he was set on making some sort of bargain – though he must have known that I hadn’t any control over Charles. Perhaps he wanted something quite simple, such as that I shouldn’t use my influence against the marriage, if I were asked. He was pressing her claims, softening me by insisting (he could have known no more than I did, I thought) that she was in love.

‘We’d better leave it to them, hadn’t we?’ I said.

‘Tell me, Lewis. We are good enough friends to say anything, I should think. Why are you against her?’

‘Wait a minute. Haven’t you something to explain to me? Not very long ago you were warning me that she might drop him. Now you’re talking about serious love. You can’t have it both ways–’

He didn’t blink, he gave his wide-lipped froglike smile.

‘Oh yes I can. You see, she has been bitten once. If she feels in danger now, if she’s getting in too deep, and doesn’t see marriage at the end, then she would pull out and save herself. She won’t risk another fiasco. If she thought that was happening she’d be capable of cutting her losses. And breaking both their hearts in the process.’

That was altogether too elaborate, I said. When I was young, I invented some labyrinthine explanations for the way I behaved with Sheila. I shouldn’t trust them now. I had come to be suspicious, more than suspicious, of second-order emotions and motives.

Azik shrugged.

‘If they come apart, you may have to see who did it.’ He broke off: ‘But you haven’t told me. Why are you against her?’

What I said wasn’t all I felt. I was afraid, I was speaking without much emphasis, that if he married young she might confine him.

‘What do you mean, confine him?’

‘She won’t alter. She’s set by now–’

‘Are you saying her opinions are set? And that young man is going to adopt them? God in Heaven, Lewis, do you know your own son?’

‘Not quite that. No, they might confine each other. They both happen to have a passion for politics.’ (Did he know that about his stepdaughter?) ‘That might restrict them, they might never get out of the groove–’

‘Politics shmolitics,’ said Azik, who encouraged, irrespective of merit, anything which Gentiles accepted as Jewish jokes.

The meeting, which seemed to have been disappointing for him and was disconcerting for me, ebbed towards, not a conclusion, but an end.

32: Staff Work, New Style

WE shall have a quiet time, I expect,’ Muriel had said in her own drawing-room, when asked about their plans for Christmas. She might have expected it, if she were less shrewd than any of us imagined: what was certain is that she didn’t get it.

Otherwise there was not much one could be certain about. What happened to them in the winter of 1966–7, no one knew in detail but themselves. I received a partial account some time afterwards, from, I kept thinking, the one source I shouldn’t have contemplated. Much of it seemed honest: but it had the disadvantages of all accounts which were given with hindsight. However, some of it I could check against events which I observed for myself. Like most bits of second-hand history, it left one dissatisfied, possibly both too credulous and too sceptical.

Still, that account was all that I had to work on. Later, I sometimes wondered what I should have said if I had had information at the time. Certainly, that they were expecting too much, that they had fallen into the occupational disease, for politicians of any age, of over-optimism. So that they sometimes seemed romantic, if not silly. But if I had known it all I should also have admitted, perhaps only to myself, that some of them were capable. They would sit in my contemporaries’ chairs soon enough, or perhaps in different chairs which they had constructed for themselves.

To begin with, it seemed – and there was nothing surprising here – that during the Christmas period and the New Year they were preoccupied with, or at least spent much of their time upon, what was now in private jargon called ‘the movement’. But they were preoccupied in a complex and sometimes ambiguous fashion. They were taking part in plans for the movement’s operations: the interesting thing was, they and their intimates, including Bestwick, had plans within plans, and these often, for security’s sake, had to be concealed.

Not that they were unrealistic or undisciplined. It was their own choice to join, as very much the junior partners, with a core of London students. A London college was to be the point of action. The Cambridge group hadn’t much to offer, except as a token of goodwill, rather like a contingent of New Zealanders being attached to American forces. They found a leader whom they would in any case have had to accept: but who in fact had a quality none of them possessed or had come across before. He was already a national figure and was to become more so. I did not meet him until much later, and then only casually: but like most other people I was soon used to seeing his face on television and hearing him talk. His name was Olorenshaw. The television interviewers and commentators called him by his Christian name of Antony, or, when they knew him less well, Tony. However, that was something like affable ministers strolling through the smoking-room and addressing backbenchers by the wrong first name. All Olorenshaw’s friends and comrades called him nothing else but ‘Olly’, following a good old lower-class habit, much in use among professional games players. Olly actually was a goodish cricketer, and had played in the Bradford League. His father was a journalist on the Yorkshire Post, and Olly had been brought up in modest comfort. He was a muscular, shortish, low-slung young man, with a snub-nosed face that one wouldn’t have noticed in a crowd.

Yet there was no doubt that he had, to use the fashionable word of that period, charisma. Characters as different as Charles, Gordon Bestwick, Grenfell, Muriel, all recognised it and succumbed to it; perhaps some envied it. Quite why he had it, or what it consisted of, none of them could analyse, even later in cooler blood. He was a fair organiser, though not as competent as some of his student colleagues: he had considerable powers of decision. He possessed some knowledge of the theory, Marcusian and so on, which was running round the student world. His intelligence was better than average, but Gordon and Charles couldn’t have thought him a flier. He was an impassioned but repetitive speaker.

None of that added up to the effect which he produced. Perhaps the answer was quite simple. He really did feel exactly as others round him felt, and had the gift of voicing it an instant before they recognised it for themselves. That night in Trinity, over a year before, Charles had said – with self-knowledge, with inhibiting self-knowledge – in politics you couldn’t afford to be too different from everyone else. In behaviour Charles to some extent acted on that maxim, and Bestwick more so: but not in feeling. Whereas to Olly it came as natural as his strong-muscled walk.

He had no irony, such as Charles in private couldn’t suppress. Irony would have been a crippling disqualification for Olly’s kind of leadership, and probably for any other. When he heard a battalion of his followers, mobilised and drilled according to plan, chanting Dinshaw-out (Dinshaw was the principal of the college), Johnson-out, Wilson-out, Brezhnev-out, any other disyllable-out, Olly was at one with them, all he wanted was to join in. Charles and others like him might have forced themselves to join in, but they would have felt the discomfort of simultaneously watching performing animals and being performing animals themselves.

In a similar manner, Olly didn’t suffer from intellectual reserves. Quite sensibly, he believed that student protests could, before too long, exact their own demands from universities. Equally sensibly, he believed that student protests would end where they began, unless they were supported by, and finally submerged in, the working class. The working class, with students acting as catalysts, was the only force which could break the old order – as an article of faith, Olly believed that that would happen. Gordon Bestwick argued that it was intellectually untenable. Gordon, still living among the English working class, didn’t dramatise them. Olly, more prosperous, did. His faith was untouched. Once the working class took over, he was willing not to lead anything or anyone again.

That Christmas, Olly and his London lieutenants met a number of times at Chester Row. They weren’t trying to hasten the revolt – the current word was blast-off – at the college. That wasn’t necessary, it was coming anyway, they judged it good tactics to let it start, as it were, out of the ruck, with no leaders at all. What they wanted was to be ready with plans and take control just before the countdown.

It was the kind of preparation and patient waiting which would have been familiar enough to any politician, public or private. Their planning of the phases of the revolt, so it appeared in the event, was excellent. Here Gordon, Charles and others who were let into their confidence had nothing to give. They were beginners, and Olly’s staff were experienced professionals. Some of them were first-class organisers. It was a mistake to think that young men in their early twenties (most of the London group were round Muriel’s age) had much to learn about organisation. That didn’t require experience, but energy and some clear minds. These did their job as briskly and unfussily as Hector Rose in middle age might have done it. Where they could still have learned something from Hector Rose was, not in primary organisation, but in foreseeing consequences.

Under the cover of those plans, which the Cambridge cell imbibed lessons from, they were also devising one of their own. It was not clear (or at least I never knew) who had the first conception, but Gordon and Charles passed it on to Olly, and Muriel used persuasion on him too. Not that he made difficulties about others’ ideas; he was ready to give these bright outsiders a run: that showed one of his strengths. All the evidence suggested that he was quick and active in getting their plan worked out. He thought it valuable enough to call it top secret (they had adopted many of the official forms). A number of followers had to receive logistic instructions, but the only persons Olly informed about the inner purpose were his numbers two and three.

The plan was, in essence, quite simple. The revolt, when under full control, was designed to occupy the main block of college buildings. Food, drink, bedding, new style chemical closets, even books, were already being stored in a warehouse close by, enough for a stay of one month. As a result of American experience, the principal’s office and the administrative floors were to be seized also, in the first hour – which was pencilled in as 4.30 a.m. (shortly before dawn on a summer morning). All that would have been arranged, in precisely the same fashion, without a minute’s change in timetable, if the Cambridge cell had not existed. The only addition that they and their sub-plan had brought about seemed innocuous enough. It was that there should be a side foray, needing perhaps a dozen men, to take possession of two offices in the biochemistry department.

That was not so innocuous as it seemed. Almost everyone concerned with secrets, particularly military secrets, lived under the illusion that they are better kept than ever happened. We had learned that in the war. Heads of State rested happily in the conviction that their own ministers were totally ignorant of the manufacture of nuclear bombs. They probably were: but there were thousands, including humble and entirely unexpected people, who weren’t.

Through an identical process, which was set going by words slipping out, occasionally in fits of conscience, but more often because of self-importance or even the sheer excitement and ebullience of living, friends of Gordon and Charles had picked up what to officials would have been a horrifying amount of knowledge about government work on biological warfare. Second-year science students such as Guy Grenfell could make a fairly sharp guess about the operations at the Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton: they could have written out a list of the viruses which were being cultivated, and the diseases which were available as weapons of war.

Further, they wouldn’t have had to guess, they knew, which pieces of the work had been subcontracted to university departments. Here their intelligence was often precise. They knew, for instance, that research upon psittacosis was being carried out, under Ministry of Defence subsidy, at this London college. They knew it. The difficulty was to prove it. That was the point of the sub-plan, which someone had christened Asclepius. Two professors were known – one of the best intelligence contacts was an obscure laboratory assistant – to be in charge. It occurred to Gordon and Charles that, if their offices could be ransacked, there might with good luck be some evidence. They didn’t expect much. They had consulted some acquaintances in the Civil Service and had learned how secret contracts were drawn up. Probably not so much through delicacy as through prudence, they didn’t come to me, who if I had chosen could have told them more. They had considered employing a professional safe-breaker. They had made up their minds to look for ‘indications’. Even a hint about biological war would be enough, Olly had become vociferous in proclaiming, to ‘blow the roof off’. They could get their hands on nothing so useful. There was no propaganda equal to this.

That sounded cynical, just as their operations sounded, because they were thought out. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that any of them, facing the prospect of biological war, were in the remotest degree cynical. Young men like Gordon and Charles – it is worth remembering, that during this period of planning Gordon was not yet twenty, and Charles a year younger – knew a good deal about power politics. Other states might possess both ultimate weapons and the will to use them. Charles was an amateur of military history, and knowledgeable about it. Nevertheless, when it came to the manufacture of disease, they felt exactly like the simplest of the young people around them. They felt a sheer horror, not in the least sophisticated, naive if you like, that this should be done. That it was done in their own country didn’t soften the horror, but added anger to it.

33: Conversation In the Open Air

THROUGH the spring they were still waiting for their time. While I remained in total ignorance of any of their plans. When I saw Charles, which wasn’t often, he was in good spirits, composed and lively, interesting on books he had read. He gave no sign of strain that I perceived. When, months later, I heard something of the story, I wondered how much I had missed or whether he had become a good actor.

One morning in May, Martin rang me up from Cambridge. What about a day at Lord’s? I didn’t see much inducement, but he pressed me. When I had said yes, I felt cross with him. He must have known that I had given up watching cricket: even if I hadn’t, the match, when I looked it up in the papers, had no attractions either for him or me. It wasn’t even good weather. Although the sky was bright, it wasn’t warm enough to sit with pleasure in the open air.

Waiting for me in front of the pavilion, Martin gave an impassive smile. Not too exciting to be unbearable, he said. We were almost alone, sitting there in the cold sunlight. Above the spring-fresh grass, the stands shone white and empty. Nothing was happening. A few runs, no wickets. From one end a large man with a long run bowled medium-paced inswingers to a legside field. From the other end an almost identical man did almost identically the same. Curious how the game had developed, Martin commented. It was probably still great fun to play. He couldn’t pretend it was great fun to watch.

Yet he continued to watch with absorption. The technique was always interesting, he said. All I admitted was that the fielding looked marvellous, out of comparison better than when I followed the game. The score seeped up to twenty-five after an hour’s play. One wicket fell, to a good catch at leg-slip.

Just before one o’clock Martin said that we had better have a snack before the rush. I was glad to move, but I couldn’t understand where the rush was coming from. In the pavilion bar, under layers of team photographs, stood half a dozen men, one of whom Martin knew. To one of the ledges under the photographs, we carried our sandwiches and glasses. Martin continued to talk cricket. I asked how he had had the inspiration for us to spend the day like this. He looked at me with a fraternal recognitory glance, and then exchanged a word with his acquaintance close by.

As we left the bar, he suggested that we might take a walk round the ground. Through gaps in the stands, one saw the players still moving in the middle, not yet come in for lunch. We arrived at the practice nets, the expanse of turf behind the Nursery end. There was no one anywhere near.

‘Yes, there is something,’ he said.

I was at a loss. Then I realised that he was replying to my question in the bar, which had actually been entirely innocent, just a mock complaint.

‘I’m not sure how reliable my information is,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Had you heard that Charles and company are trying to crash Porton wide open?’

That was the first intimation I had. Those meetings in Muriel’s study, which were later described to me, had not been so much as suspected, and still weren’t, either by Martin or me, that morning at Lord’s. He had been given – so I discovered – only the slimmest of hints.

It was enough for him. Most people would not have taken so long, wouldn’t have eased away time by technical analyses of the game, before they broke the news. But Martin, as he grew older, had developed the habit, not uncommon in men who had seen many things go wrong, of deliberately slowing himself down, of adapting the displeasing to his own pace. It was a habit which I had noticed long before in his predecessor in college office, Arthur Brown.

‘I’ve heard nothing at all,’ I said.

‘Does it make any kind of sense? Is it in their line?’

‘It could be.’

‘How would they get hold of anything? I suppose it mightn’t be impossible.’

He knew very little more. Martin and I exchanged remarks about biological warfare in our old kind of Whitehall shorthand. We might have been back in wartime, talking about the most recent news of the nuclear bomb. In fact, that was why Martin had led me to the practice ground, where we could speak without being overheard, just as in the war we held some secret conversations in the middle of Hyde Park.

‘It could be dangerous,’ said Martin.

‘Who for?’ It didn’t need asking.

‘For anyone who wants to broadcast something he hasn’t any right to know.’

‘Yes. Meaning Charles.’

‘Charles. One or two others as well, I fancy. I’m thinking of Charles.’

We had reached, walking slowly, the rough and piebald grass where, during festive matches, the tents were pitched.

Martin said: ‘He might get into desperate trouble. If he gives them a chance to use the law against him, they could take it. He wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘They’ll try to keep it quiet–’

‘He might have gone too far for that.’ He was speaking very quietly. ‘Good God, he’s making a nuisance of himself.’

‘That’s the least of it.’

‘Why in hell does he want to set up as the conscience of the world?’

For an instant, I got away from thoughts of Charles.

‘I’m not sure’, I said, ‘that that comes too well from you.’

Neither of us could forget that when Martin had been in his thirties, years older than Charles was now, he had behaved in a fashion that was (if one had been feeling like sarcasm) comically similar. From inside the nuclear project, he had attempted to write a letter of outrage when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had stopped him, at a cost to our relation which had taken some time to put right. Then later, with the headship of the whole English operation open to him, he had, without flurry and almost without explanation, resigned. All Charles’ friends would have thought Martin a hard and worldly man: he could be both those things. Yet, among the middle-aged people whom Charles knew, Martin was one of the few who had made a sacrifice.

Hearing my gibe, he gave a grim smile, lips pulled down.

‘I should have thought’, he said, ‘that I was in a privileged position.’

He went on talking of the penalties that anyone breaking official secrets might pay. We both knew all about it. Some careers could be closed, or at least impeded: one would find mysterious obstacles if one attempted most kinds of official life. Martin’s concern, and mine, became practical, almost as unethereal as though we were trying to watch over Charles’ health.

To some, it would have seemed puzzling, or even unnatural, that Martin should be so much affected. True, he had shown a glint of brotherly malice, of obscure satisfaction, that, after all his troubles with his own son, I should run into one with mine.

But that glint emerged from feelings which contradicted it. Martin had a family sense much stronger than my own. Charles might have existed for years as an incarnate reproach to Martin’s son: but he was also the chief hope of the whole family. With any luck, Martin believed, he was going to make his independent name. And Martin imagined him making a name in the official world where Martin could himself have been successful. It was noticeable, I thought, that people living inside what Charles’ friends called a ‘structure’ couldn’t easily picture able men fulfilling themselves outside. That had been true of me when I lived, as Martin did now, in a college, or afterwards in Whitehall and Westminster. Somehow these institutions, which had their own charm to those inside, set limits to one’s expectations. Enclaves which made for a comprehensible life. When one left them behind, as I had done, it was a bit of a surprise to find that enclaves weren’t necessary, and that comprehensibility wasn’t such a comfort as one had thought.

So that some of Martin’s hopes for Charles I could get on without, and my concerns, as we walked back and forward across the Nursery turf were less sharp-edged. Yet still I was shaken by thoughts of prosecution – or less than that, plain scandal, almost as my mother would have been. One’s self-sufficiency dropped away. One cared where one didn’t choose to care: often where one ought not to care. Scandal, notoriety, row. He was proposing to act – so far as I could tell – according to his beliefs. To many – what did I think myself? – they were decent beliefs. Scandal, notoriety, row. I wasn’t a stranger to them myself, and had survived.

Yet that wasn’t a consolation, as I walked with Martin in the chilly afternoon.

‘I’m not certain’, Martin was saying, after a period in which we had each been brooding, ‘that what I did (he meant, his resignation) was right. If you think of what has happened, it wasn’t.’

‘You couldn’t have predicted that.’

‘There is not much excuse for being wrong.’

It was true, we had all been wrong. We had foreseen that if men made nuclear bombs they would use them. There would be the slaughter of many millions. We shouldn’t escape a thermonuclear war. It was because he couldn’t accept his share of that responsibility that Martin abdicated. As it turned out, what we expected was the opposite of the truth. We shouldn’t have believed it, but an equilibrium had set in. It might be an unstable peace, but it had been peace for over twenty years. By this time, we were afraid of other fates, but not of major war.

So the most quixotic action of Martin’s life looked, in retrospect, like a bad guess.

I said: ‘Perhaps it helps the rest of us if one or two people show they don’t approve of mass annihilation.’

‘I wonder.’

He had been right about Hiroshima, I said. We got hardened to killing with astonishing speed: it was one of the horrifying features of the human animal.

‘I dare say’, Martin remarked, ‘that you and I have become hardened too, don’t you think?’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘You know, this business that Charles is kicking about, there was a time when I couldn’t have taken it, could you?’

‘Most people can take anything. Not many kick.’

‘Perhaps that will be a comfort to him some day,’ Martin said.

‘It’s the only one he’s likely to get.’

What was to be done? ‘You could do more harm than good,’ said Martin, thinking of his own attempts to guide Pat, who put up no resistance and then found some new manoeuvre. With Charles it would be a mistake to try anything remotely subtle: he wasn’t labile as Pat was, but he was hard to take in. The only way was to be direct. We arranged that I should write him a letter, saying that this gossip had reached me, and telling him he ought to be aware of the Official Secrets Act. Then Martin, back in Cambridge, would ask him round. They were on good terms, it would be easier, and conceivably more effective for Martin to talk to him than for me.

The pavilion bell was clanging, and Martin showed a disposition to return to the game. I delayed him, having something else to ask.

‘Your information,’ I said. ‘How did you get it? You haven’t told me–’

He hesitated.

‘Everything is in confidence, you needn’t worry,’ I told him, playing a family joke, that he was so secretive that he didn’t like telling one the time.

He returned the gibe.

‘Within these four walls,’ he said, waving a hand towards the bare expanse, mimicking a colleague of ours long since retired.

‘Well then,’ he went on, ‘it was through Nina.’

I exclaimed, and recalled some talk about attachments.

‘From the young man Bestwick, I suppose?’

‘I think not.’

Martin’s reply, unusually brusque, sounded as though he didn’t favour Bestwick.

I said: ‘I have a lot of use for him, you oughtn’t to write him off–’

‘I’m not writing him off. I rather wish that it did come from him. But it was from someone else.’

‘Why did she tell you?’

‘I fancy she was trying to protect him.’

‘Not Charles, of course?’ She was fond of her cousin, but they had never been close.

‘Oh no.’

It seemed that Martin was not certain whom she was protecting. That afternoon, I couldn’t identify the name.

But I could identify the way secrets leaked. Just as they got hold of news about Porton, so they had let out their own news. There was a certain perverse symmetry about it. Particularly as Nina was the channel, one of the most trustworthy of girls.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this mustn’t go any further.’

‘Nina told me that.’ Martin smiled. ‘Just to make certain, I told her the same.’

I didn’t like what I had to say next.

‘You’d better impress on her that she mustn’t tell her brother.’ That was the nearest I could go to impressing on Martin that he mustn’t tell his son. It was bitter to have to say anything, but after the disclosures of last year I dared not take a risk.

Martin said, without expression: ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. You needn’t worry, he won’t be told.’

34: Communiqués From Headquarters

THE results of our communication with Charles were not dramatic. To me he wrote a civil and affectionate answer, saying that since he had now studied the Official Secrets Act, there was some danger that he would get mixed up and include it in his papers in the Mays: while Martin reported over the telephone that Charles had in conversation been completely sensible, but neither admitted nor denied that the rumour was correct. ‘If he is considering anything,’ Martin said, ‘then he’s got it worked out every step of the way.’ Which had been true of Martin himself, in his days of action.

With that I could do nothing but leave it. There were some disturbances at London colleges throughout May, but they did not amount to much more than shouting in the streets and in the quadrangle at King’s. I paid them very little attention, since I still knew nothing of any link between student risings and this warning about Charles. In the same spirit, when the major rising actually started, in the first week in June – at the end of the Cambridge, but not the London, term – I watched the film shots on television with a detached interest, not much more involved than if these events had been taking place in Stockholm or Warsaw.

Which, in everything but language, they might have been. The students, and especially the students milling in the streets, looked as international as airports. Hair, dress, expressions, slogans, pop music – as well as the same hatreds and the same hopes – had broken across frontiers like nothing else in the century. Watching these spectacles, I thought the only local difference was that the police weren’t using shields. This was the most international activity I had ever seen.

Pictures of the principal, students at each shoulder, being interviewed on the pavement. Yes, he had been requested not to enter his office. Requested? No reply. Communiqué that night from the Students’ Headquarters, Principal’s Office.

Messages of support from Essex, Oxford, Sussex, Cambridge. That conveyed nothing to me. If I had known, I might have reflected that the sight of young men and girls fighting in a porter’s lodge, swearing like George Passant in a rage, some of them being frogmarched by policemen, seemed some distance away from quiet conferences in the boudoir-study at Chester Row, a dozen heads round the table, talking in the low unassertive voices that were common form, refreshed by some maidenly coffee or Coca Cola. It was as long a distance as from any staff headquarters to the front line.

For Margaret, who had taken part in ‘demos’ in her youth, and for me, who had seen the street mobs in Germany, the sight of violence wasn’t pretty. Maybe it wasn’t to some of the planners. That I didn’t know and, since I was uninterested, didn’t think about. But I did have a passing thought that there were organising minds behind it.

Anyone who had spent half an hour inside a political movement would have realised that. There was a fair amount of chaos. Some allies, including Muslim liberators and a free-drugs party, must have been an embarrassment. There was some violence which didn’t appear premeditated. But too many contingents arrived at what seemed the right time. Too many squads (the serious invaders, as opposed to the irregulars, seemed to work in platoons of round about a dozen) knew what to do. College porters, secretaries, staff, were picked up, led out, put gently enough into cars, all too quickly and smoothly to be true. True, that is, in terms of the student manifestoes, or what we heard on the news or on discussion programmes from Olly himself.

Spontaneous. Rising against grievances not attended to for months. Complaints not recognised. Student rights. Participation. He gave us all that, as his face became familiar on the screen. He wasn’t smooth. He had what had come to be called a classless accent, meaning one which could belong only to a small but definable class. He had the gift of speaking like a human being, who believed what he said and wanted you to believe it too. He didn’t appear clever, and sometimes not coherent. Several of my acquaintances said that, if he joined either of the major parties, he would get office before he was thirty.

‘Tell me, Antony,’ said one of the cordial television interviewers, ‘do you expect to get most of your demands?’

‘We can’t help not get them.’

‘But what, I know you’re explaining what the students are insisting on straight away, what do you really expect to get?’

No smile. ‘We shall get what we take.’

He wasn’t hectored on the screen, as the national politicians might have been.

‘Yes, I understand, but that isn’t your basis for negotiations, is it, Antony?’

Long, disjointed, sincere speech.

‘You mean, do you, Tony, that you want to establish rights for all students everywhere?’

‘We’re not only struggling for students, but for everyone who’s not allowed to speak for himself.’

‘That means, doesn’t it, that even if and when you reach a satisfactory settlement at the college, you’ll still go on protesting–’

‘The struggle will go on.’

The principal of the college, interviewed in the same programme two nights later, wasn’t so comfortable, nor so respectfully treated. He was a man in his mid-forties, with a neat small-featured face. I hadn’t met him, but as he was a physicist and a good one, the Getliffes knew him well. He was said to be fun in private, and to be conscientious and open-minded. Why he had given up science and taken to university administration, none of his admirers could understand. Perhaps he couldn’t, as on the box he gave an impression – so unjustified, that he ought to bring a slander action against himself, someone said – of being irresolute and even shifty.

Yes, he was in favour of student participation at all levels. They would be welcome on suitable college committees.

‘But aren’t you on record as saying, Dr Dinshaw, that the students’ claim to a place on appointments committees–’ Dinshaw. That, of course, was a special case: it wasn’t considered in the students’ interest to take part in appointments of lecturers or professors.

(Why the hell, said Margaret, doesn’t he say that they’d be totally incompetent to judge?)

But didn’t Dr Dinshaw agree that the students felt it was very much in their interest? Dinshaw. There were two views about that, after all, there were students and students. The students with whom Dr Dinshaw would have to negotiate, however, had only one view? Dinshaw. The real academics among the students, the ones who would really understand about academic excellence, and that was the important thing about a place of higher education, didn’t take part in this kind of student activity.

Of all his remarks, that one sank the principal into most trouble with the press. From then on, the interviewer was needling him. What did the principal understand by the students’ wider aims? If they reached a settlement with the college, then Mr Ollorenshaw had pointed out there were claims on behalf of others? At last, badgered, Dinshaw broke out that it wasn’t his function to negotiate for the entire human race.

For us, a few minutes’ diversion. Each night for a week, there was something about the students. When Charles came round one morning to fetch some clothes, I mentioned that, to begin with, we didn’t like to miss the news. But, as a spectator sport, rioting became monotonous. We were getting tired of it. He smiled. I didn’t think of asking him whether he knew any of the participants. Instead, he mentioned that he had seen Francis Getliffe, who was off to spend the summer at the house outside Montpellier, which, with his usual decision, leaving me out of it, he had bought that spring.

It might have been two or three days later when, not on television, but in The Times, I saw an item of news. One headline ran:

STUDENTS CHARGE COLLEGE WORKING ON GERM WAR.

That was it. I needn’t have read any more. Angry that I had seen so little, I still didn’t see all the connections, or even most of them: but I saw enough. Enough to be waiting for what was coming next.

Actually, the students’ announcement was, like most of their official utterances, discreet. It was issued as one of their communiqués from the principal’s office, said simply that documents had been found demonstrating that the college microbiological department was under contract to the Ministry of Defence, through the MRE at Porton. The students would insist that all work on biological warfare should be stopped forthwith.

That was ingeniously drafted, I thought. Unless it were a sheer invention, which seemed unlikely, they had got hold of some papers, and the authorities wouldn’t know which or how much they gave away.

The signatures, as with all the previous communiqués, were those of Olly and his two adjutants from the college.

Apart from the headlines, the newspaper wasn’t spending much space on the announcement. Nor did any of the others that I read. In one leader it was referred to, in an aside, as another sign of ‘immature thinking’. The leader went on to ponder whether the grants of student protesters should be withdrawn, and rather surprisingly used this example of immature thinking to conclude that they should not.

There was no reference anywhere to collaboration from outside, or to any Cambridge group. For some reason, perhaps technical, they were being kept in the background, and I was asking myself how much respite that would give.

35: A Fog of Secrets

MARGARET was already going to bed when, late the following night, the front door bell rang. I had been sitting in the drawing-room, not certain how much longer I could bear to wait: whether it was wise or not, I should have to talk to Charles. For an instant, I thought this caller might be he. Opening the door, I saw – with disappointment, with let-down – that it was Nina. Rain was trickling from her mackintosh cape and hood.

‘I’m so sorry, Uncle Lewis, I don’t know what the time is–’ she said breathlessly.

‘Never mind.’

‘But Daddy asked me to give you a message, without fail, he said, tonight.’

‘Come in.’ The let-down had vanished. I couldn’t delay in getting her coat off, bringing her into the drawing-room, meanwhile answering a call from Margaret about who it was.

‘Well?’ I asked Nina, pressing a drink on her which she wouldn’t take. Just then Margaret, in her dressing gown, joined us, kissed Nina, interposed another wait.

‘What did your father say?’

Nina swept dank hair from over her eye. She said: ‘I tried to tell him something on the telephone this morning–’

‘What was it?’

‘Give her a chance,’ said Margaret. Nina smiled at her, and then at me. She was shy but firm and self-possessed.

‘I told him I’d heard something about people making enquiries at Chester Row, but he stopped me. He wouldn’t let me speak on the phone. So I had to go to Cambridge. Then he wouldn’t ring you up either, so I had to come back and see you tonight.’

‘Yes,’ I said, restless with impatience, ‘what was this message?’

‘He said to tell you – it looks as though someone like Monteith is already on the job. You must advise them straight away.’

I glanced at Margaret. It was all plain. Too plain. Martin’s precautions about the telephone had probably been automatic: he had lived with security all through the war and after. So had I, for longer. I had had dealings with Monteith myself, when he was number two in one of the security services. I had dropped out of that claustral system, but I remembered hearing that he had been promoted.

‘You were told this morning, were you?’ said Margaret. She was quiet but as urgent as I was.

‘Yes,’ said Nina. The previous evening, two visitors had called at Chester Row. One was a conspicuously fat man (that must be Gilbert Cooke, I broke out, he had taken Monteith’s place at number two, the investigation was starting at a very high level).

They had asked all sorts of questions. They had been very friendly and polite –

‘They would be,’ I commented. There was a technique in interrogation. The next interview, if Gilbert took it himself, wouldn’t be quite as friendly.

‘Who did they ask?’

‘Charles. Muriel. They’d seen Olly already, somewhere else. Oh, and Gordon Bestwick was at Chester Row last night too.’

‘What did they seem to be after?’

‘How much they knew about bw (biological warfare). Where they’d been for the last week. Had they been inside the college. Had they seen the files from any of the offices. You know.’

I knew, and Margaret also, that Nina herself was remarkably well informed. She was as cool as any of them. She reported that, early in the proceedings, before they were interrogated separately, Muriel had enquired whether she could send for her solicitor, if it seemed a good idea. Charles had stopped her, saying that it was a very bad idea. That was, Margaret and I agreed without a word spoken, good judgment on his part.

They had parted with cordiality. The next step, the fat man had said, was – if they wouldn’t mind and if it wasn’t too inconvenient – for them to have a talk with his superior. That sounded like Monteith himself: I still couldn’t understand – and if I did understand, I was more troubled – why they should be working this enquiry from the top. Normally it would be done by agents very much junior, though Cooke might have been shown the papers.

Those ‘talks’ were beginning tomorrow: that is, since it was now nearly midnight, in a few hours’ time. Olly and the signatories to the communiqué had been ‘invited’ to attend in the morning, Charles, Muriel, and ‘poor Gordon’ in the afternoon. They were to go to the Admiralty – which everyone else took for granted, but which seemed to me like a piece of mystification for mystification’s sake. Monteith and Cooke had perfectly good offices of their own, together with a dislike for using them.

‘Why “poor Gordon”?’ Margaret was asking.

‘He seems to be taking it harder than the others,’ said Nina, with a sort of clinical kindness. Then she told us, now that she had given us the hard news and could be off duty for a moment:

‘Do you know, when Daddy heard that all this happened at Chester Row, that was the first time he had realised that Charles and Muriel were living together?’

She gave an innocent smile at the innocence of the elderly.

‘What did he think about it?’ Margaret said.

‘I think he was rather shocked.’

As a matter of fact, about a sexual adventure Martin and a none-too-prim citizen of Antonine Rome would have been about equally shockable. If he disliked this one, it was because the woman had been his son’s wife, and he was still capable of blaming her.

I had been thinking, it would be better if Nina, not I, rang up Chester Row. If they were at home, I ought to go there at once. As she was obeying, she hesitated and remarked, as though it were an afterthought: ‘I don’t think anyone mentioned Guy Grenfell last night. I don’t think he’s having to go tomorrow.’

Then she went to the telephone. Those last words seemed curiously inconsequential: but Margaret looked at me with eyes indulgent but sharp. She had no doubt – that Guy Grenfell was Nina’s channel of communication – and very little more that she had brought him into the conversation, partly because she was anxious about him, partly for the pleasure of uttering his name. Uttering his name with people there to hear: she might be self-possessed, an excellent courier, but she wasn’t immune to the softer pleasures. Margaret liked her for it. As for me, in the hurry and tension of the evening, I wondered for a moment whether this also would come as a surprise to Martin, and whether or not he would approve.

In the hall of our block of flats, I waited, Nina beside me, for a taxi. I was feeling the special chagrin of no transport that came upon one in big towns. It was raining as hard as that night the previous summer when Charles had sauntered slowly home, absent-minded with joy. If we walked to the tube station, I said to Nina, we should get drenched. Did she mind? Don’t be silly, Uncle Lewis, she said, taking my arm as physically relaxed as she was shy, dark hair falling from under her hood, cheeks flushed, looking already naiad-like in the rain. I had an irrelevant thought, it was absurd, that on this particular night I should arrive at their house, Muriel’s and my son’s, just as inspissatedly soaked as when I first arrived, long ago, at Sheila’s.

We were, however, rescued. A car drew up – ‘Aren’t you getting wet?’ came a cheerful but not original question. The driver happened to be the one neighbour with whom, after twenty years living there, I was on social terms. Chester Row? No problem. Humming merrily, rosy after a party but driving with care, he took us through the midnight-empty streaming streets.

At the house, Charles opened the door, with Muriel waiting close by, but there was at once a hiatus. He held my coat, but both of them were looking, with glances that were not unfriendly but steady and purposeful, at Nina.

‘How are we going to get you home?’ said Charles, quite affectionately, giving a good impersonation of an elder brother. He didn’t look it, but he was a month younger.

‘I think I’d better order a car. We shan’t get a taxi tonight,’ said Muriel.

They weren’t going to talk in front of Nina. They had realised, it didn’t take much divining, where my information had come from. They didn’t seem to resent my possessing it (in fact they had greeted me with warmth and perhaps relief) but they weren’t giving Nina the chance to transmit any more. They had become, and no one could blame them, as security conscious as the men who had been questioning them.

They were doing less than justice, though, both to themselves and Nina. It wasn’t through their laxness that she had learned any single fact: as I discovered later, Guy Grenfell had of necessity to know all the secrets, and they couldn’t have foreseen that, apparently all of a sudden, he wanted to share everything with this girl. Whereas Nina, who was really as discreet as her father, had spoken only to him. She couldn’t do more, because of her obligations to the others, nor less, because of her duty to do her best for Guy.

Anyway, Muriel did not take her upstairs. We all waited down in the dining-room, Charles pouring me a drink, making a kind of family conversation about Irene’s sciatica and Maurice’s new wife, whom by this time they had all met. Nina, not at all touchy, showed no sign of resentment at being shut out. She had the talent for acceptance which one sometimes found in the happy. We were all listening, me with impatience, for the car to drive up outside.

At last the three of us were alone in the long drawing-room. Charles and Muriel sat on the sofa facing me, his arm round her and fingers interlaced. It was not often that they were demonstrative in public, if by public one meant anyone else’s presence, such as mine.

I said: ‘Well, I’ve heard these people came and questioned you. You’d better tell me what they said.’

Their account, though fuller, agreed with what I had been told already once that night. They both had precise memories, and sometimes they reproduced conversations word by word. There was one point of interest, though it was predictable. When they were being interrogated separately, the two agents had left them for a few minutes, obviously to confer, and returned to concentrate on a day, the preceding Wednesday, for which Charles had already given a story of his movements. She had been taken over the same hours, asked where she had been, how much of the time he had been with her, whether she could sketch out her diary of the day. It was an old trick, and I was surprised that Cooke had used it so blatantly. It had got nowhere. Their reconstructions coincided, and they had demonstrably been telling the truth.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all right. But it’s tomorrow that matters.’

‘Or rather today,’ said Charles looking at his watch. It was now past one o’clock.

‘You’ve been summoned for the afternoon, haven’t you?’

They nodded.

‘That gives us a bit of time. There are several ways you ought to prepare yourselves–’

‘Look,’ said Charles, ‘I can handle this situation for myself. For us both.’

It sounded like, it was, a flash of adolescent pride, such as he might have shown two or three years before but had long outgrown. It was strange to hear it from him now. For an instant he seemed sham-arrogant, young or even pathetic. I was moved by a once-familiar yearning, now forgotten or submerged.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Muriel, squeezing his fingers, calling him by a pet name which I had never heard. ‘He knows things, we don’t. You’ve got to listen.’

Charles’ face was close to hers, as he broke into a slight acquiescent smile.

‘The first thing is,’ I said, ‘don’t underestimate them. They don’t work the way we do. They don’t believe in intuition much. They just go on adding one and one. But they tend to get there in the end.’

I went on: ‘Which means, whenever they have a fact right, and they will have a large number of facts right, your best line is to agree with them. Don’t deny anything which they can prove. That makes it easier, if you want to deny something which they can’t prove.’

‘I follow,’ said Charles who was now gazing at me with concentration.

‘Don’t say any more than you need. You can tell them you disapprove of biological weapons. They’ll be used to that. Don’t elaborate. Don’t go in for systematic theory. Remember their politics are simpler than yours.’

‘What do I do?’ asked Muriel.

‘The same.’

‘Won’t it look as though he’s rehearsed me, though?’

‘You can’t provide for everything. People aren’t clever enough to pretend for long. No, you say the same. Same facts, same timetable, same attitude. That’s natural. After all, to some extent I presume it happens to be true.’

Muriel gave a neutral smile. For the first time I noticed a very small dimple on her right cheek, close to her mouth, which didn’t appear to have its replica on the other side.

‘I want to ask you something,’ I said curtly. ‘For practical reasons I ought to know. It’s almost certainly Charles they’re after’ (I was addressing myself to Muriel) ‘not you. So I ought to know.’ Then I spoke straight at him: ‘What have you done?’

He leant back, the whites of his eyes visible under the irises. ‘That’s not so easy to answer–’

‘That’s nonsense.’

She was coming to his help, saying, ‘No, it’s really not,’ when he sat up and faced me.

‘No,’ he said, in a level tone, ‘I don’t mind telling you, but it isn’t so easy. I don’t want to fake it either way.’

‘Well then. Did you extract those letters from the office?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not with my own hands, that is. But that’s the trouble, I don’t want to pretend that I’m not involved.’

‘How much are you involved?’

‘I knew about it before and after.’

‘But you didn’t take the letters?’

‘I’ve told you, no.’

‘You had them in your hands?’ As I asked, Muriel was shaking her head, but he wasn’t looking at her for confirmation.

‘Not that either. But I’ve seen photostats.’

That, though it was clearly true, seemed an odd piece of bureaucratisation.

‘Have you been inside those offices?’ I meant by that, those of the principal and the professors.

‘Not at the relevant times.’ (That is, when the files were ransacked.) ‘But I have been inside them, yes.’

‘So have I, so have the others,’ Muriel intervened. On the spot, that baffled me. It appeared that each of the Cambridge group had been by himself inside the college. Charles and Muriel, not together but on their own, had been smuggled in at night. Later it occurred to me that Olly might be making certain that they were committed. He had made use of them, very sensibly, as staff officers, and hadn’t wasted them as crowd fodder. As for spokesmen, he didn’t want too many public faces. But the private faces had to perform some token action: so each of them had made his visit and had, in form, taken part in the occupation. After they had told me of those incidents, so far as I could guess holding nothing back, I said: ‘That is all?’

‘That is all,’ said Charles.

‘They will know nearly everything you’ve said, either of you.’

I was talking of Monteith and his people. I emphasised that they would almost certainly know of meetings in this house and of the nocturnal visits. They would probably know that Charles was one of those who had been shown photostats. It was not impossible that they had had an informer somewhere near: it was not impossible, it was probable that they had one, though how close to the centre I couldn’t guess. It was not impossible that they knew of Charles’ staff work and of the first idea about the bw documents, but that would be very difficult to prove. On that he needn’t volunteer anything.

‘It comes to this, doesn’t it?’ Muriel was speaking, having been subdued most of the night, acting only as a support for Charles. ‘They’ll know that he’s connected, we couldn’t cover that up if we wanted to, could we? But that’s really all they’ll know and I suppose something like that applies to me.’

‘That’s the best you can expect,’ I said.

Neither of them was soft, but they were lost, and to an extent frightened because they were groping, in the security fog. I had been in my mid-thirties when, at the beginning of the war, I had my first taste of that peculiar chilling swirl. They had walked into it very early. When I mentioned that there might have been an informer among their circle, even in this house, they had looked both astonished and, unlike either of them, dismayed. They had felt an intimation of the mosaic of paranoia, the shrinking or freezing of one’s own nature, that came to any of us when overwhelmed by secrecy. You had only to feel that paranoia for a short period in your life, to live just temporarily with security, to understand what happened to conspirators once they gripped the power and then realised there might be other conspiracies, this time against themselves.

Quietly, Charles asked: ‘What is the worst we can expect?’

‘They might know effectively everything that you’ve said and done.’

‘What would that mean? For him?’ Though, as the night went on, Muriel’s eyes were becoming reddened with tiredness, they were brilliant. She had become much more aggressive than he was. She sounded, all the tricks of politeness gone, as though she were defying me.

I replied, doing my best to seem professional, that it was almost unthinkable they would prosecute. It wouldn’t be worth the publicity. Incidentally they wouldn’t like to give away their sources of information. There would, however, be entries on personal dossiers. There would be communications about Charles and his friends with persons at Cambridge. It was conceivable that one or two promising academic careers would be interrupted.

‘Do you think that will happen?’ he said.

‘Your guess is about as good as mine.’

‘If it does, you wouldn’t like it, would you?’

‘No.’

He said: ‘Nor should I.’

He had been speaking intimately, equal to equal. He didn’t ask if I understood why he had acted. He might have taken that for granted, or thought it irrelevant. He wasn’t trying to be considerate. It was knowledge, of himself and me, that he was speaking from, not emollience.

‘You know,’ he said, in genuine, unaffected surprise, ‘I didn’t think I should mind – if it came to trouble. I find that I do.’

Muriel broke in fiercely, as though rallying him, though he was much calmer than she was. It couldn’t and didn’t matter practically: nothing would break his academic career for long: anyway, it didn’t matter, he couldn’t really be touched. Anything he had ever talked of doing, was quite outside anyone else’s power.

I sat silent while she stormed at him, once or twice her gaze flashing towards me.

Charles smoothed back her hair, and said: ‘All right. All right. But some of us don’t find it quite so easy to escape from the respectable embrace, you know.’

He said it teasing her, with affection. Yet, strangely enough, though he had made remarks which sounded arrogant once or twice that night, that was the only one which struck me so.

A little later, as I was getting ready to go, he said to me, in an altogether different tone: ‘I’m sorry if all this is a trouble to you. I know it is.’

I said, taken by surprise at his naturalness, more bluff than I usually was, that there were worse things.

Muriel, brilliant with courtesy returned, said: ‘We’ve been very grateful for all your help, Uncle Lewis, you’re much too kind, aren’t you? I’m very sorry if we’re a trouble to you. I am so very sorry.’

36: A Selected Meeting Place

NEXT evening, Gordon Bestwick called on me. By this time they had become obsessively careful about telephoning or any other means of communication short of physical presence: thus Charles hadn’t rung me up to report on his interview with Monteith but had sent Gordon round instead.

At least, that was the ostensible reason for the visit, but I soon found that he was consumed with worry. Perhaps Charles thought I might give him some relief.

It was hard work, either when Margaret was present or when she had made an excuse to set Gordon and me free for a walk outside. To begin with, he wouldn’t talk at all about the interview that afternoon. Whether they had resolved not to speak to unauthorised persons, and whether they had decided that Margaret was such a one, I couldn’t tell. It might have been that she still kept an air of something like privilege whereas I was nearer to the ground he knew.

If that was so, it was a classic case of misjudgment. For Margaret, used all her life to her relatives making exhibitions of themselves for conscience sake, was the least disturbed of any of us. After all, her father and his friends had received obloquy and worse through being conscientious objectors in the First World War: they had been under inspection twenty years later as premature anti-Fascists, being used as front men by the other side. They were people who had been brought up – and who had had not negligible encouragement of private means – not to give a damn.

So, though she hadn’t much patience with the students’ cause, she felt in the nature of things that spirited young men would join it. If they didn’t count the risks, well, since her marriage she had come to know so many of my colleagues who (and she had once felt this of me) counted the risks too much. Not that she didn’t count the risks for Charles: but she would have said, except when the superstitious flesh was overruling her, that she hoped he wouldn’t do so for himself.

She did her best to get Gordon talking as he sat sprawled on the sofa, great formidable head back against the cushions, at times fidgeting upwards as though he were trying to take part. The head wasn’t less formidable, but more grotesque, on account of a large acne pustule on his nose. He looked so miserable that we both forgot that he was a man probably stronger, and with the certainty of more powers to come, than either of us. We just saw him lolling there, with the lost-for-ever misery of youth. And it was a double misery. Once he roused himself and asked Margaret when she last saw Nina.

‘Last night, actually,’ said Margaret, speaking the truth, not knowing whether she should.

‘Oh.’ A hard noise. I felt a kind of pity, sentimental perhaps, for young men who had no confidence with girls.

Soon afterwards Margaret left us, and immediately I asked him what had happened yesterday. Even then he did not reply at ease. I had to say, my brother and I felt safer, discussing security affairs in the open air. Would he prefer that? When we were walking up the street towards Lancaster Gate, for the first time his voice lost its dullness.

The interrogations, he said, had lasted about an hour each: there was mention of more to follow. At intervals ‘the man’ (who had not introduced himself) interjected not as questions but as facts, statements about the examinee – ‘where I was, what I had been doing,’ Gordon told me. ‘Irrelevant, a lot of it. But they had collected stuff about me that they seemed to know better than I did.’

They had been to his school, and to people who knew his family. That was standard technique I said. It seemed strange to have it brought up now, he replied. That was standard response, everyone felt that, I said. As for what happened, both in the rising and in the plans, they knew plenty.

‘They’re leaving us guessing in spots. Whether they know or whether they’re bluffing. But they know enough to fix us. If we try to fool ourselves about that, we shall make things worse.’

Apparently one or two of the principals, though not Charles or Muriel, were still self-buoyant with optimism (the adrenalin optimism of action, perhaps; Gordon had spent last night upon them, using his bitterest and most competent tongue). As we walked along, he wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t have been foreseen. Up a side street, people were carrying their tankards outside a pub, standing on the pavement in the warm air. I asked Gordon if he would like a drink. No, he said, he wasn’t feeling much like it. He might be one of those – I could sympathise – who in trouble shied away from any sort of solace.

Except perhaps the solace of making resolutions.

‘This is a lesson for us, anyway,’ he said roughly, not looking towards me, but as though I were a companion who had to be convinced. ‘We mustn’t make the same mistake again. We tried to do two things at once, and that’s because we were too conceited. We made it all too complicated, it was my fault and Carlo’s. It seemed a good idea, but it was an infantile mistake. It mustn’t be repeated–’

He meant, and it was probably true, that without the inner plan of seizing official correspondence the rest would have been a total success. Which to the external world it had already been. Olly and his committee were getting their demands piecemeal: by the end of the summer their whole charter would have been met. But that was easy, Gordon was reflecting with harsh realism. Whatever students wanted as students would be given them on a plate. It was child’s play to make that kind of impact. But when the impact broke through a bit deeper, got right among the things which the society would hold on to like death, then the forces of resistance suddenly crept round you –

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon, ‘why do they always know when to use their blasted advantages?’

I replied, with the kind of sarcasm that I should have used to Charles, that it didn’t seem to me entirely unreasonable. You used your means of offence: established society replied with its own.

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon. ‘I hate them. I hate them and everything they stand for.’

He was not disposed either to dispassion or irony. What was right for him was wicked for the other side. That capacity for anger was a great help to him that day and might, I thought, be a strength in the future. Nearly all men of action possessed it. You had to believe the other side was a hundred per cent wrong, and preferably evil, to be a hundred per cent committed to your own. It was one of the more disagreeable facts of life. I much preferred Gordon when he was sad, trying to cope with a heavyweight temperament, mind sharp, senses rebelling: but it was his talent for anger which acted like a blood transfusion that evening, lifted him out of sadness or even fright, made one simultaneously less engaged by his company and more certain that he would survive.

It must have been shortly after that night, possibly in the same week, that he met with the rest of the inner circle on two occasions, which, according to the accounts I heard later that year, were more eventful, or at least more tense, than any of their planning sessions in Chester Row.

There had been a geographical change. These two meetings didn’t take place in Muriel’s study. The whole group had now become hypnotised by security, as we all did when it percolated round ourselves, as detestable as the smell of gas. They decided that Chester Row, and they were not necessarily wrong, was not security-proof. So they shifted the venue.

Their choice of a second meeting place seemed to bear the imprint of ingenious minds familiar with political history, possibly Gordon’s or Charles’: for, with what must have been a tinge of satisfaction, they chose a setting not likely to be kept under surveillance. That is, they chose the London house, in Halkin Street, of Guy Grenfell’s father, chairman of his local Conservative Party, Baronet (for political and public services), member of the Canton, Beefsteak, Pratts, The Turf and White’s.

A disinterested observer might have gained a subdued pleasure from the fact that this house, in period, style, structure and market value, was remarkably similar to Muriel’s and only just over half a mile away.

Present at both these meetings were Olly, his two deputies, Muriel, Gordon, Charles and Guy Grenfell. The first of them lasted from 9 p.m. till something like one the next morning, the second rather longer. There was little to eat or drink. Before them was a single topic, the security attack on the bw disclosure, and how to get out of it with the least damage.

It was possible to think, as some of them did in calmer times, that they exaggerated their danger. Perhaps for the first time they were not behaving like experienced operators. If so, I was partly to blame: for my warnings, which had been overstressed and more darkened by pessimism because I was thinking of Charles, had been taken as a precise, almost official, forecast by Muriel and Gordon, and relayed as such to Olly. So that from the beginning they all assumed that lies or stonewalling weren’t going to last them for long: they had as a minimum, to produce a story which admitted some of the truth. That is, that letters about the subcontract had been suspected, and deliberately searched for, and then, as was public knowledge, used.

The story ought to be kept as simple as possible. It ought to involve as few persons as possible. Security might know or half-know more than they could reveal, and would conceivably be placated by an account which was less than complete but was self-consistent.

All this was debated, and often repeated, for they were all under strain, at the first session. It seemed that Muriel played more of a leading part than usual. She wasn’t as creative as one or two of the others, but she was as acute, particularly for this kind of semi-legal argument, as any of them. She also had influence on Olly, so that in the end she brought him round to a solution. It could be very simple. It could be just one person’s private initiative. And that meant one thing. Someone had to take the rap.

That phrase had been used by Olly – who, like other leaders, had no fastidious objections to a cliché – to sum up the first meeting. It would not be difficult to develop a history of how one person became committed to the idea and executed it. Who? It had, in order to agree with the facts which security were known to possess, to be one of the Cambridge cell. In the end, it reduced to one of the three, Charles, Gordon, Guy.

As I had already been told, the real conception had emerged, not only from those three, but from several others, all drawn together in a sort of invisible college or committee of young men. Who carried it through, that is who was present when the offices were invaded and the files searched, I never knew, nor (I was nearly certain) did my source of all this information. Apart from his own denial, I had some reason, circumstantial but strong, to believe that it was not Charles. I was inclined to think that the balance of evidence pointed to Gordon. In any case, it was very largely chance who had been the actual agent. Olly paid no attention to it when, in the second session, he made them come to a decision. Someone had to take the rap. It had to be the one whom the movement could most easily spare. Olly might not be a brilliant young man: possibly he would not be heard of much again. But in that meeting he showed his quality. Not brought into contact with him (I was told that I should be bored) I thought he sounded something like a junior Parnell. Not bright: not specially articulate, but somehow he could stay still and people waited to listen to him.

The one whom the movement could spare. There was no sentiment about the choice. If it fell on Gordon, he would suffer most, being poor and depending on his grants and the prospect of a Fellowship. While Charles was the youngest of the whole party. So far as anyone could see, Olly didn’t give even a token consideration to either of those claims. He cut out what old Pilbrow used to call the personalia. He was cordial and, without making a show of it, ruthless.

None of this was done quickly. Leaders of his type didn’t utter laconic orders out of the side of the mouth. It was a long churning conversation, more like a trade union committee than a meeting of the Stavka. The more astute, though, didn’t take long to see that the result was already determined. Gordon was the last man to sacrifice, Olly led one of his aides into saying: they needed him for the future, he was their best economic brain, probably the best brain all round that they possessed. On a reduced scale there was some similar opinion in favour of Charles. He wasn’t specially popular with Olly: perhaps his ironic tongue, or the fact that some of them thought him unduly lucky, had made enemies. He himself said that he was reasonably dispensable: the consequences, in practical terms, would not be all that important to him. But the majority would not have it. Whether living with Muriel went in his favour or not, it was impossible to make out. All in all, the positives outweighed the negatives, and they said that he was too useful to lose.

So, slowly, talk gradually converging, never pointed, the party came to look towards Guy Grenfell. Just how it was made clear to him that he had to volunteer, remained obscure, even when I was told the story. Almost certainly, there was no direct remark or question. On the other hand, there must have been a number of hints, and not too subtle ones. In his own house, very likely having thoughts of his parents, Guy for a long time managed to avoid seeing them.

It must have been, I thought later, like a drawing-room version of more mortal sacrifices. You couldn’t read the diaries of the Scott expedition without realising that it had been hinted, more than once, to Captain Oates that he ought to go. The solemn issue of morphine pills a few days before. No one I knew who had been in any kind of collective danger, doubted the tone in which that was done. The finale was grand. They were brave men. Actions weren’t the less grand because those who performed them were recognisably like the rest of us.

It took a long time, but Guy brought out his offer. Not in a gallant manner, but with a touch both of truculence and superciliousness. The others responded with relief, but taking it very much for granted. They all knew he had money of his own. They all knew also that he was not a star academic. Charles, who was fond of him and felt he was a richer character than most of them, first repeated his own offer and then acted as impresario in producing enthusiasm for Guy’s. The others crowded round with comradely applause. Courtesies over, they set to work composing a history – where Guy was a solitary figure – which security would find it hard not to accept. They did not break up until that was tested and done.

Security either did find it hard not to accept, or, more likely, for their own reasons were glad to pretend to do so. All that outsiders – including me, at the time – knew was that, suddenly, the fuss about biological warfare disclosures died down. There was an official statement, of a muffled nature, saying that no secrets had been revealed and that precautions about the Official Secrets Act in relation to Government Research Establishments were being enquired into, as a routine precaution. The college issued its own statement saying that, in general principle, contracts from Government departments were not normally undertaken; that the demands of the students for representation had been met: and further that the college and the students had set up a joint committee to examine any further points in dispute.

Some time in July, Charles and Muriel paid us a call, and with meaning but without explanation said that Guy Grenfell would in September be leaving for Harvard and would complete his studies there.

37: A Garden and Lighted Windows

WHEN Muriel asked over the telephone if I ‘could possibly call round’ for a drink, and I said yes, neither of us pretended the invitation was just a casual thought. As before that year, she had chosen Margaret’s evening away from home: arriving at Chester Row, I should have been surprised to find Charles in. At once, as I entered the drawing-room, Muriel apologised blank-faced for his absence. Then she kissed me, not in the happy-go-lucky English fashion, but as though it were a deliberate, an hieratic gesture. Our cheeks parted, and she was standing upright, her eyes not far below mine: I noticed, which I hadn’t before, the first starry lines at the corners, fine and faint on the smooth healthy skin.

She led me to the window seat, where she had been sitting. At the bottom of the window, a few inches were open.

‘Is that too much for you?’ she asked.

‘Not a bit,’ I said, amused by the old-fashioned phrase. Actually, the breath of air was warm: outside it was a beautiful night for late September.

Facing me on the seat she said: ‘I wanted to tell you, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Yes?’

‘We’re fairly certain now that we’re in the clear.’

I nodded. I didn’t ask for evidence. On such a matter, I had confidence in her judgment.

‘We thought of letting you know before this. But he was keeping his fingers crossed a little.’

‘So should I have been.’

‘Would you?’ She looked at me with a flash of interest, as though searching my lineaments for the most vestigial resemblance to my son.

There was a momentary silence. She said: ‘It really is all right, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Excellent.’

As we sat there on the window seat, there was another, and a longer, silence. I was used to her enough by now to feel that this wasn’t the only point of the meeting. Her legs were intertwined, one foot jerking from the ankle. It was rare for her not to have her body, as much as or more than her expression, under complete control.

She said: ‘I wonder if you could possibly bear to have your drinks in the garden? It’s almost nice enough, perhaps. Of course it’s being a terrible nuisance–’

‘Let’s go,’ I replied. She was taking refuge in politeness which didn’t sound like politeness, which might have been mocking. But when I began to move, she leapt up, crossed the room to the sideboard, agile with physical relief. She arranged the tray, and preceded me down the stairs, through her back sitting-room, out to the patio garden. Carrying the tray, she was as poised as a shipboard steward. Some women, I thought, with a figure like hers would have been conscious of it, but that impression she had never given me.

At the end of the garden, table and chairs were waiting under an overhanging rose bush, a bloom or two gleaming out in the twilight. There was a smell, already autumnal, of drying leaves, blended with something less wistful, perhaps – I couldn’t place it – a tobacco plant? She poured out a drink for me, and I sat comfortably sipping. The news was good. Whatever she was intending to say, I was ready to wait. It was getting on for seven o’clock in the evening. In the west, towards the King’s Road, the sky was still luminous. From the houses on each side of Muriel’s, lighted windows were already shining.

Looking at one of them, amber curtains drawn with a chink between them, a standard lamp just visible, for an instant a shape passing across, I felt a curiosity, or something softer like a yearning, which when I was younger I should have thought inadmissible, maudlin and nevertheless undeniable, and which was just as undeniable now. Once, long before, when I was an outsider, gazing at strangers’ windows from the nocturnal streets, it might have been explicable that I should have imagined the hearth glow of homes such as I didn’t have: when I longed for one to return to. Often I had pretended to myself that it was sheer inquisitiveness about others’ lives, trying to feel proud because I wasn’t tamed and was on my own. That wasn’t altogether false. The inquisitiveness was there also. Walking with Maurice on the sombre Christmas afternoon, two or three years ago, I had been oddly gratified – more than the event deserved – as he pointed to lighted rooms in the derelict squares and told me some of the stories that lay behind.

Yet that evening in Muriel’s garden, when curiosity and longing ought both to have been satisfied, I felt the same emotion as I should have felt as a young man. Habits, I had told myself, before this, at a time when I had learned less, lived longer than freedoms. Sometimes they told one more about oneself.

We had been sitting quietly. Muriel gazed up the garden at her own house, so that I could see only her profile, which was becoming softened as the light grew dimmer. Then she said: ‘I’m sorry, but I think you’re misunderstanding me.’ Her tone was clear, but (I thought I heard) not quite composed.

‘What about?’

‘Charles.’

‘What about him?’

‘You won’t see it. But you and I, we’re on the same side.’

‘Are we?’ My voice had become rough and unconceding.

‘I think we are.’

She wasn’t to be beaten down. Her eyes were fixed steadily on me now. She said: ‘You’d like him to make the best of himself, I think you would. And so should I.’

‘We might not agree’, I replied, ‘on what that means.’

‘It means, that we should like him to make the most of his talent. Or wouldn’t you?’ For an instant, she gave a sharp and attacking smile. There was nothing between us, though. Neither age, nor sex, nor subliminal dislike.

‘Of course I should.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid that he may take one risk too many.’

‘You mean, what you’ve just been doing–’

‘No, no, no. We’ve learned something. That’s not the correct way, we shall have to find another method. By the way, I’m not apologising for us. I’m sure he’d be angry with me if I did. And I don’t feel like doing so on my own account.’

‘What is this risk that he’s going to take?’

She shook her head. ‘Haven’t you noticed that he keeps his secrets?’

‘From you?’

‘Oh yes. From me.’

‘What do you know then?’

‘I don’t know. I may be imagining it. You can guess how one does–’ Just then, she lost her crispness.

‘Well, what are you afraid of?’

‘It’s not for tomorrow. It’s not until he’s finished at Cambridge’ (that is, until he graduated in the following June). ‘Then–’

‘Then what?’

‘I think he may be deciding to get away from us all.’

‘Will he leave you?’

‘Men have left women before, haven’t they?’ She added in a level tone: ‘He would also be leaving you.’

‘Men have left their fathers before, haven’t they?’ I replied, copying her. Then, to make amends I said: ‘But that’s different. He’s bound to do that. In fact, he’s done it already.’

‘When he came to me?’

‘Long before.’

‘Do you think he’s quite as free as that?’ Eye-glint in the expressionless face. She went on: ‘Who do we believe he’s escaping from? You think it must be me, don’t you? I rather prefer to think that it’s really you.’

I smiled. Even now, when she was speaking in earnest, her kind of subterranean impudence once or twice broke through. I said that it might not be either of us: I had come, I told her, to distrust the subjective explanations. His motive might have nothing to do with anyone but himself.

‘I don’t care why he’s doing it,’ she said sharply, ‘so long as we can keep him safe.’

‘You still haven’t told me, safe from what?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘No, what are you thinking of?’

She looked away, frowning.

‘In some ways, he’s cautious, isn’t he? He always says he’s very timid, but all that means is that he likes working things out in advance. He can be very cool, but he’s a gambler too. I think that’s what I’m afraid of. He might decide to do something sensational if he thought it was worth the risk.’

She might be right. My nerves were getting tightened in tune with hers. At the same time, I was thinking, it was strange to hear Charles, whom I assumed that I knew well, described by someone who also knew him well.

‘I wish’, she said, ‘we could find something for him that kept him away from that–’

‘What would you like him to do?’

Eye-glint again.

‘Just about the same as you would. Something nice and quiet for a few years. Like Gordon Bestwick–’ She told me that Gordon was proposing to get a job in academic life, waiting ‘in the slips’ (which of them had invented that ridiculous idiom?) to see where he might go into action. There wasn’t any doubt, she said, that some Cambridge college would soon snap him up. There wasn’t any doubt that the same would happen to Charles also, if we could persuade him to stay.

‘Well, that’s what I should like for him, to begin with. There couldn’t be anything more respectable than that, could there?’

She gazed straight at me, and went on: ‘You used to think that I wanted to get hold of him, didn’t you? Just to be useful in campaigns?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘You were quite wrong, you know. I doubt if anyone could get hold of him like that. I should never have stood a chance. No it wasn’t that. You can see it wasn’t that, can’t you?’

I nodded. ‘What is it, though?’

She replied: ‘I want him.’

After a pause, she added: ‘I wanted him before we started. I want him more now.’

She was speaking even more quietly, like a reticent neighbour at a dinner table asking one to pass the salt. At the same time, there was an undertone of something like blame – no, heavier than that – directed not at him nor me, but at herself. She wasn’t convinced, it seemed, that I believed or trusted her. She was playing for me as an ally, she hadn’t pretended anything else: now, as though the treaty were not signed and one party had to produce evidence of good faith, she was searching for something to tell me.

It was then that I heard some history. About the meetings in her house, and the undercover plans. She described the sessions in Halkin Street, which were, of course, utterly unknown to me. In fact, there wasn’t much of her story I was likely ever to have known: for neither she nor Charles would have spoken without a purpose. Ostensibly her purpose was to persuade me that she hadn’t over-influenced Charles, that in their political efforts they had been partners, and that, so far as there was influence, it had been more on his side than hers. That I couldn’t judge, though her reporting seemed as precise as his would have been. In any case, the balance of influence didn’t interest me so much. I was listening to what she was saying – whether intentionally or not, I didn’t know – about herself and Charles.

I remembered hearing Azik Schiff talking about them in his splashy exuberant domestic fashion. His stepdaughter’s taste was distinctly more austere. She did not once admit or confess that she was in love. She certainly wasn’t rejoicing at the state in which she found herself. She seemed to feel resentful, or at least not pleased with fate, at being emotionally trapped: just as another woman, starting a casual affair, might curse at another trap, that is the more primitive one of being pregnant.

The curious thing was, that about her feeling for Charles Azik had been right: right for the wrong reasons perhaps, but still right. She was in love. Myself, long before, even when I had been frustrated and wretched, I drew a kind of elation out of the state itself: other people were dull dogs, here was I, borne up in a special capsule of my own. Nothing like that was true of Muriel. If I had mentioned my own experience to her, she might have regarded it either as a sign of self-deception or alternatively as though it was as irrelevant as some reminiscence from the Languedoc courts of love.

As we gazed up the garden, lights had sprung out from other windows. Muriel’s house had the second and third floors left dark. Her voice sounded more than ever clear. None of us had been sure that we knew much about her. Was it possible, I was wondering, that she was one of those who were abnormally free of sexual guilt, and who, on the other hand, weren’t easily touched by what I called love and in my youth boasted about? So that, if they were threatened or overcome by that kind of love, they felt it as a dark and frightening force. If you took sex without guilt or any other consequences or ancillaries, were you at risk? That is, did you fear all the menace of emotion that most of us had taken as part of love? That seemed to be true of some of the old Greeks. Or the Japanese. Might it be true of this young woman, so disciplined, trying to persuade me as we sat in her garden?

It was noticeable that, when she spoke of other human relations, she wasn’t inhibited at all. Just as she had once asked me whether I loved Charles, so she spoke without any reserve about her love for her own child. As though parental love wasn’t a danger, and we could in tranquillity use the word. Well, she hadn’t yet known in full what parental love was like. Perhaps she was right though, in talking as though they were different in kind. As I had thought one night lying in the hospital bedroom, if love was the proper term for what (as I had that evening accepted) she felt for Charles, then though parental feeling could be as desperate, and could bring as great a solace, it ought to be called by a different name.

Talking of how much she loved the infant, she mentioned that Charles was very fond of him.

‘He loves children, did you know?’ she said.

She added: ‘I’d be glad to give him all he wants.’

It sounded casual, but she hadn’t said much that was casual all that evening. When I let her see that, if she was right about Charles’ intentions, then obviously I would help her if I could, she wasn’t satisfied. She couldn’t leave it alone, almost as though she were persuading, not me, but him.

38: Interrogation By a Statesman

WHEN the rumour spread that someone was intending to speak about the summer’s disturbances in the Lords, most of us believed it. If acquaintances eagerly brought a vaguely displeasing rumour, it usually turned out to be true. None of Charles’ group – all except Muriel were now back for the university term – appeared to be much perturbed: but Charles decided that it ought to be watched.

That was the reason that he and I, one afternoon at the end of October, were sitting in the gallery of the Lords’ Chamber. I had tried to get tickets from Francis Getliffe, but was told that he hadn’t returned to Cambridge: so I had fallen back on Walter Luke, who said that he was down to answer a question that afternoon. As soon as I looked at the order paper, I expected that it was the question Charles and I were waiting for. It was fourth and last on the list. The Lord Catforth. To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the defence contracts alleged to be disclosed during the disturbances at — College in June had actually been placed with the college.

It wasn’t a masterpiece of legal drafting: but the civil servants who had to write the official answer would have realised at first sight that it wasn’t innocent. I could recall similar questions arriving flagged in my in-tray in days past: and Hector Rose’s glacial and courteous contempt for all the trial shots at the answer, including, though for politeness’ sake not mentioned, the most senior, being my own.

The civil servants would have known, it was their business to know, something about the questioner. He was a backbench Labour peer, recently ennobled, who had served a long time in the Commons: a trade unionist who had made a speciality of military subjects, on which he was considerably to the right of the Tory front bench.

It was a Thursday, about five past three. High up in the gallery (there was, as mountaineering books used to say, an uncomfortable feeling of space in front of one) we looked down on a packed house. A house so packed that it might have been one of the perspectiveless collective portraits of historical Lords debates, hung in their own corridors. The scarlet and gold was swamped. Grey heads gleamed, bald heads shone: there were some very young heads also, one or two as hirsute as Guy Grenfell’s. This attendance was not, however, in honour of Catforth’s question. A debate on Southern Rhodesia was to follow later that day, and there might (or might not) be a vote. For most of those present, the preliminary questions were merely curtain-raisers or minute-wasters; to be endured, just as for parliamentarians anticlimatic business was always having to be endured.

Not so with Charles. He was leaning forward in the gallery, hands clasped round one knee. The fourth question might – it was not likely but it was possible – have its dangers. He was keyed up, but actively so, as, so I guessed, he would have been before an examination. If he could have taken part, he would have been happy.

He was also, I supposed, not put off by flummery. He and his friends were disrespectful towards English formalities, but they were used to them. A stately question number two about salmon fisheries in Scotland made him smile, but not so incredulously as if he had been a foreigner. Content changed, forms stayed, I used to think. I was no nearer knowing the answer to an old puzzle of mine, how much of the forms he and his contemporaries would leave intact.

At last the fourth question. ‘The Lord Catforth.’ A big man, with large spectacles and a black moustache, rose from the middle of the government benches, opposite to us in the gallery. ‘I beg leave to ask–’ standard formula, but not mumbled, sententiously uttered.

Walter Luke, who had been putting his feet up from the front bench, stood at the dispatch box. His hair was now steel grey, not pepper and salt, but his face had filled out in his fifties, the lines, instead of being furrows, had become undramatic creases.

In the comfortable West-Country burr, from his official file he read:

Her Majesty’s Government are aware that certain allegations were made during the June disturbances. As my honourable friend said in another place on 29 June none of these correspond to the facts as known by him. It is true that from time to time defence contracts have been placed with the college, as with many other university institutions. All such contracts are of a research nature which makes them suitable for work in university laboratories. They are placed in accordance with recognised procedures which have been used for many years, in the case of the college in question, since before 1939.

Loyal hear-hears from those near Walter. The civil servants must have calculated, I was thinking, that the wider, the better.

Lord Catforth, on his feet again: While thanking my noble friend for that answer, it does not appear to answer the question.

Scattered hear-hears.

Will my noble friend tell us whether any contracts of a specifically military nature relating to biological warfare have been placed with the college?

As soon as I heard that, I was sure that there had been some colloguing with Lord Catforth. Perhaps the whips had got at him. Anyway he was not the man to disapprove of any weapon either already in existence or ever to become so.

And Walter Luke was suspiciously quick in glancing at the answers to possible supplementaries with which he had been briefed.

Lord Luke of Salcombe: I can assure the house that no contracts of a specifically military nature, either relating to biological warfare, or any other kind of weapon, have been or will be placed with the college under the present government.

Louder hear-hears.

Someone gave voice from under the gallery whom I couldn’t see.

Does the noble lord deny that there has been a security leak? Can he estimate how valuable the information about biological warfare will be to the Russians –

Order, order.

Now I thought I recognised the voice. Man of the ultra-right. Probably attending to speak about Rhodesia.

Lord Luke of Salcombe: As I have said to my noble friend, Lord Catforth, there has been no contract of a military nature relating to biological warfare, and so no information about biological warfare could have been or has been elicited.

Defence spokesman from the Tory front bench, rising quickly: Can the noble lord assure us that appropriate security precautions have been taken?

Lord Luke of Salcombe: I can certainly give that assurance.

The last question had been intended to be helpful. But it didn’t, as it was meant to, silence the interlocutor below.

Can the noble lord tell us how much information reaching the public press during the riots carried security classifications?

Lord Luke of Salcombe: It would not be in the public interest to answer questions which might bear on security matters.

Very loud hear-hears from both sides of the house.

Voice: Well then. Was any of the information which reached the public press covered by the Official Secrets Act? I should like a straight answer from the noble lord. Yes or no.

Lord Luke of Salcombe: I am not prepared to let the noble lord form my answer for me. My answer is in fact the same as my answer to his last question.

Voice: The noble lord seems incapable of giving a straight answer. (Order, order, and a few hear-hears.) Perhaps, since we shall be bound to hear in due course, he might conceivably answer this one. Is the government intending to prosecute any of the persons concerned under the Official Secrets Act?

Lord Luke of Salcombe: No, my lords.

A few cries of why not, and then a venerable figure spoke, with a disproportionately strong voice, from the government rear.

Lord F: Does the government realise that many of us on this side and throughout the country share our young people’s detestation of this atrocity called biological warfare?

Lord Luke of Salcombe: We fully realise what my noble friend has said.

Lord F: Further does the government realise that anything said about biological warfare by any of the young spokesmen during what I prefer to call the events of last June was said in a spirit of genuine and absolutely spontaneous indignation?

I looked at Charles, so that his glance met mine. The whites of his eyes were as milk-clear as a child’s, the irises almost black. For an instant, blinking not winking, the lids came down and opened again.

Lord F had spent his life in liberal faiths and never lost them, but Walter Luke could have done without him that afternoon.

Lord Luke of Salcombe: We all know, at any rate, how genuine my noble friend’s spontaneous indignation is.

The voice under the gallery was raised again, but there were grumbles of order, the leader of the house was half-getting up to intervene, until among a hubbub the supplementaries ceased. One of his colleagues was patting Walter on the knee, and – because another was speaking near to a microphone – we heard a bass and presumably confidential ‘well done’.

Walter’s cheeks were ruddy and shining. Probably not knowing that he had done an old friend a good turn (for Monteith and his apparatus didn’t pass on much to ministers, perhaps in this case the bare results, not names which they regarded as peripheral as Charles’) he had enough reason to be modestly pleased with himself. His permanent secretary was likely to have warned him that ‘this might be an awkward one’: students by themselves were a delicate subject by now, students plus security were as delicate as you could reasonably get short of espionage. I should have been prepared to bet that the officials had done some conferring with Walter’s political boss (the Secretary of State, Walter’s ‘honourable friend’, who sat in the Commons and for whom Walter, as his number two, answered in the Lords). Any official would have wished that an experienced politician had to cope with that subject, not an amateur such as Walter.

Still, Walter had done well. I hadn’t had attention to spare, but now I was thinking, he might have sunk the Government into trouble. He had got away with it. If this had been the Commons, he would have had a rougher time.

Just then I noticed Azik Schiff entering the chamber and jerking his head in the direction of the throne. I hoped that he wouldn’t look up towards the gallery. He had been made a peer that summer and for a few weeks had revelled in it. He had still been at his most exuberant, when in Muriel’s garden, I thought of him and two different kinds of love, thought of him as a happy man with emotions spilling over.

Now I didn’t dare to meet him. Certainly not with Charles by my side. Perhaps, if I believed that I could have been any use to Azik, I might have found the courage, or shamed myself into it. As it was, all I wanted was to avoid his eyes.

It was easier (and more selfish and self-protecting) to return to thinking of Walter. Just as when, not so long before, I was planning a Christmas party and George Passant told me that he was in horrifying trouble: then as now, one’s first impulse was to escape, one needed to get him out of the house.

Yes, Walter might have got the Government into trouble. Strange how tactful he had been. Transformed from the brash scientific roughneck of his Barford years. As though he were acting. Sweet reasonable public face. Once upon a time he used to make brisk observations about men with public faces. Stuffed shirts. Then, as though no happier phrase had ever been invented, he would repeat it.

But I recalled that as a very young man, when he was first elected a fellow of the college, he had been as tactful as he was this afternoon. Also self-effacing. Perhaps he had overdone the brashness. It was a part that suited him. Now he seemed to be returning to his youth. I wondered whether he was bland to his officials. Or whether they were treated to the middle-period Walter: unregenerate, behaving like a tycoon in a film, cracking insults out of the corner of his mouth. Strange how a man so rigid in character should act parts in his life. No, not so strange. Just because he was so rigid, the transformations had to be hard-edged. With others they happened in the flux of life, merging into one another, like the colours of an iridescent film, merging continuously and still preserving the same and unique film.

It hadn’t been only Walter’s tact, though: there had been some operating in private, through ‘the usual channels’ perhaps, or with Walter and his colleagues conducting some informal little talks themselves. Lord Catforth would have been exposed to blandishments. It was clear that the official opposition had been squared. That was easy to do in a security matter: besides, the official opposition was at least as gently disposed to young rebels as the government, probably more so. Almost certainly, Walter Luke would have had a drink with his opposite number on the Tory side. The opposite number would know, without being told, that Walter proposed to obscure the issue and tell a ministerial fraction of the truth. The opposite number also would know that the students’ disclosures were factually true. Walter would wrap up his answer so as to avoid a direct lie. In effect, though not in legalistic words, he might be telling one.

Both front benches, and many experienced persons in the House, would know all those things. It would be a mistake to imagine that they felt qualms of conscience. This was how you had to behave, if you were going to govern at all. Walter had taken it as all in the day’s work.

I must have been letting loose a smile, for Charles, sitting at my side in the gallery, returned it, though he could not have guessed anything near the reason. I was thinking about him and one of fate’s practical jokes. For it was because of him, who had with strong approval seen me shut the last door on politics and so dismiss the most minor of the three themes of what Margaret’s forebears would have called my moral life – it was because of him that I was here, returning to the old subject, interested in the machinery as I used to be. No, as I had confirmed to myself in hospital, it wouldn’t capture me again, but there it was.

Just as it was because of Charles that I had been reminded of the other themes, stronger than the first. I had been reminded that they could revive, and had – face to face with Muriel I knew it – already done so.

Walter had instructed me that, when we were tired of sitting in the gallery, we were to make our way to the tearoom. If questions had been followed by the Rhodesia debate, it would have taken more force than mine to tear Charles away: but in fact the next item on the order paper was the second reading of a bill to legalise the use by other denominations of certain redundant Anglican churches. Charles’ spirit was not so deeply stirred by that, and so soon we sat close to the tearoom tapestry, waiting for Walter Luke.

When he arrived, I had to introduce Charles to him. He was asking us both, before he sat down, had we heard the bit of fun and games? By which he meant his performance. It was an unnecessary question, since he knew we had come for nothing else. We nodded.

‘Was it all right?’ said Walter.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Did you think it was all right?’ Walter had turned to Charles.

‘Yes, it was excellent, sir.’

‘I thought it was all right myself,’ said Walter Luke.

He wasn’t being jocular at his own expense, comparing his present incarnation with the not-so-distant past, or recalling his one-time animadversions on persons fulfilling public functions such as he now fulfilled. There was no irony about Walter Luke. There never had been. He was enjoying his existence, and he proceeded to make a hearty tea, eating several cakes and pressing them on Charles, very much as my father had done at their only effective meeting.

Walter was asking Charles about Cambridge, and said – and this surprised me, much more than similar apostrophes from Lester Ince – that he had never liked the place. Why not? Well, as soon as he got really going on his research, the Cavendish was proceeding to break up. As for the college, it got on his nerves. Sometimes men like old Winslow made him feel there ought to be a servants’ entrance constructed specially for him, Walter. (Loud, crackling laugh which caused heads to turn from nearby tables.) Then there was Roy Calvert. It got you down, living within touching distance of melancholia.

I hadn’t realised that the young Walter – he was speaking of himself at twenty-four or five – had observed so much.

‘You knew Roy Calvert then, did you, sir?’ Charles asked, polite and expressionless.

‘You’ve heard of him, have you?’

‘Just a little. From my father.’

‘I was jealous of him sometimes,’ said Walter with simplicity. ‘Poor chap.’

To him, Charles’ question must have seemed pointless. Yet Charles himself he seemed to have taken a fancy to, though he couldn’t have found much in common.

After tea, he asked us not to go unless we had to: it was a bit early to start drinking, but we might as well pre-empt a corner in the guest room.

It was the same tactic that Francis Getliffe had used on my last visit there, and the same window corner. Walter stood for a moment, spine as upright as though he were in surgical splints, gazing over the river through the November drizzle. The necklace of lights on the south bank dimly glimmered. It was not a spectacular vista, but he was gazing at it with proprietorial pleasure, as though he owned it.

When we sat down, the room was nearly empty, though one figure was in solitude drinking gin at the bar. In a comradely, roughly casual but unaggressive tone, Walter said to Charles: ‘My lad, what are you going to do with yourself?’

‘Do you mean tonight, sir?’ Charles, trying to gain time, knew that Walter meant no such thing.

‘No. I mean what are you going to do with your life?’

Charles asked, gently: ‘What do you think I ought to do?’

‘Damn and blast it, old Lewis will be better on that than I am.’

Charles looked at me and said: ‘He’s been very good.’

It was a gnomic remark, but it sounded genuine and without edge, and I was touched.

Charles went on: ‘I should be grateful for some advice, I mean it, you know.’

Charles forgot nothing. He remembered Margaret teasing me after I had refused Walter’s present job. And the family exchanges about asking advice. One’s truisms had a knack of coming home.

‘Well, you’re obviously bright, anyway you’ve proved that. So that you must be sure of what you can do best–’

‘Yes. But how many things are worth doing?’

Suddenly Charles’ tone had changed. He was now speaking with intensity and force. So much so that Walter dropped his avuncular manner. His horizon-light eyes, set full in the rugged head, confronted Charles’ deep-set ones.

‘No, not many. That’s why most of us just do the things that come to hand. That’s what I’ve done.’

‘But is that always good enough?’

‘How do I know? Only God would know, if he happened to exist.’

‘Would you have liked to do anything different, yourself? If you’d had an absolutely free choice?’

That wasn’t disrespectful. There wasn’t any offence, umbrage, mock humility or presumption on either side. They were talking with a curious mixture of impersonality and friendliness, something like Mansel and a colleague discussing an eye operation.

‘I used to think’, said Walter, ‘that I should like to have done some first-class physics. I never did. Not within bloody miles of it. The war came along and I got shunted from one job to another. They said they were useful. I thought they were useful. That was a hundred per cent copper-bottomed excuse for not doing real physics. And sometimes I looked at myself in the shaving-glass and said Walter my lad you’re a fraud. It isn’t any blasted excuse at all.’

Charles was listening, hand under chin. Just for an instant, perhaps because of Walter’s rolling Devonshire, and his Christian name, the tableau brought back the old Victorian picture, the youth hanging onto the sailor’s tale: in my early childhood I had it fixed in my mind that the sailor must be Raleigh.

‘Then I began to get my head down to its proper size,’ Walter went on. ‘All that was just damned silly inflation, I thought. What difference should I have made if I’d stayed in a physics lab every blasted minute of my life? The answer is, damn all. There aren’t more than five or six men in the whole history of science who’ve made a difference that you can call a difference. And that’s where you don’t belong, Walter Luke.

‘Take old Francis Getliffe. He’s kept at it year in, year out. He’s done some pretty nice work. If I’d stuck at physics as long as he has, I might have done about the same. I should have chanced my arm more than the old boy.’ (After hearing Francis, not far from that same spot, express pity for Walter’s ill-fortune, there was a certain pleasure in witnessing the same process in reverse. Did Charles know that, of the two, most of their fellow scientists thought that Walter had the bigger talent?) ‘Well, if old Francis had never existed or had gone in for theology or stamp collecting or something of the sort, someone else would have come along and done exactly the same work within a matter of months. All that happens is that the old boy gets a hell of a lot of satisfaction. I suppose I might have got that too. But damn it to hell, what does that matter? When you know that you could be got rid of and no one would feel the difference?’

Walter finished in a cheerful, ruminative, acceptant tone. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? If your head’s the proper size, you see that you’re not all that significant. Anywhere. So I finished up here.’ Walter swept an arm as though to take in the Palace of Westminster. ‘Hell, it’s good enough for me.’

‘What you’re saying’, Charles asked him, ‘would apply to anything creative, wouldn’t it?’

‘Unless you were old Will Shakespeare, I should think it did.’

Charles had gone over this argument with me before: not that I disagreed about the fundamentals, though I should have altered the stress. I knew that he had argued it also with his cleverer friends at school since he was thirteen. He said: ‘No one wants to do second-hand things, do they? Scholarship’s second-hand, even the best of it. Criticism’s second-hand–’

‘That comes from having a literary education,’ Walter burst out in his old-style raucous vein. ‘You think a bloody sight too much of criticism if you put it as high as second-hand. Our infernal college’ (he turned to me) ‘after we’d cleared out elected some damn fool who’d written a thesis on the Criticism of Criticism. Instead of electing him they ought to have kicked his bottom down the Cury.’

Charles smiled, but wasn’t to be put off. ‘Anyway, no one wants the second-hand things. And there’s no use doing first-hand things unless one is superb, is that right?’

‘That’s a bit stronger than I meant,’ said Walter, who, despite his conversational style, was a moderate man.

‘Well, is this nearer? You wouldn’t allow the old romantic conception of the artist. That is, an artist is justified whatever he does and it doesn’t matter much whether he’s any good so long as he thinks he is.’

‘That’s puffing nonsense,’ said Walter Luke.

‘I believe it’s disposed of forever. Among my generation anyway,’ said Charles. ‘You’ve never had any time for it, have you?’ He turned to me.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ I replied.

‘Well, we’ve wiped off quite a lot of possibilities, haven’t we?’ Charles had the air of one who, very early in a hand at bridge, could name where the cards lay.

‘For God’s sake, lad, don’t let me discourage you from anything.’

Walter was subtler than he seemed, or wanted to appear. He had realised some time before that this discussion was not entirely, or perhaps not at all, academic.

‘Please don’t worry. You wouldn’t discourage me from anything if I didn’t discourage myself. Most of those things I’d ruled out long ago.’

‘I hope you’ve left something in,’ said Walter, boisterous and avuncular again.

‘A little.’

‘Well, what’s it going to be?’

‘I can’t tell you anything definite yet.’

‘Tell me something indefinite, then.’

Charles grinned. Not perturbed, he said: ‘I do think that the things worth doing in my time are going to be a bit different.’

‘Why? Different to what?’ Walter said.

‘Different from things that your contemporaries did. I think we ought to do things which will actually affect people’s lives. Quite quickly. Here and now. Not in a couple of generations’ time. In our own.’

‘What does all that add up to?’

‘Don’t I wish I knew?’

‘You’re thinking of something like the other end of this place?’ Walter jerked a thumb in the direction of the Commons.

‘No, not quite that, perhaps.’

‘Anyway, you don’t know yet, do you?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Oh, don’t rush yourself. There’s plenty of time,’ said Walter. When Charles was expressing indecision, speaking almost bashfully, I doubted it. I didn’t believe that Charles had started the conversation for my benefit, either to challenge or (what might have been more likely, as our relation changed) to prepare me. It was a mistake growing out of egotism or paranoia to suspect that all actions were aimed in one’s own direction. Even with a person to whom one was close: he could have, and had, his own purposes which were quite independent of one’s own. That, I was sure, was true of Charles as they started talking in the guest room. The mention of Roy Calvert had no reference to me, or to any thought of his that Roy’s daughter and I had been dissolving hostilities because of him. He had her on his mind, that was all.

But there had come an opportunity, or a turn in the talk, so that he could say something, not much but something, which he wished me to hear. It might have been easier to do so via Luke, using him as an interpreter, so to speak: quite likely it was, whether out of consideration or semi-secretiveness, or father-son aphasia, of which we all knew the intermittences. scarcely mattered.

The one certain thing was that he had passed on a message. If I asked for its final meaning, I should be evaded. There had been the best of openings to tell me, if he chose. He knew, it didn’t need repeating, it would oppress him if repeated, what I wanted for him. Not his happiness: that was for him to get: to wish that would have been mawkish, and though I could be so about acquaintances, I wasn’t about those closest to me. But I did wish, in the most elementary and primal fashion, for his well-being.

He knew that well enough. Once when he was nine or ten I had taken him for a walk, and he had rushed in front of a car. Quick-footed he had backed away, with not more than inches to spare. The driver cursed, ‘You won’t have a long life, you won’t.’ Charles saw that I was pallid and couldn’t speak. Sometimes when still a child he asked me about it, and got brushing-off answers. Then he gave up asking. But when my eye went wrong he took my arm with solicitous and much more than filial care, much more compensatory than filial, whenever I had to cross a road.

On our corner table, there was a round of drinks. Walter Luke was giving instruction to Charles about science in the last war, pointing with blunt fingers at the end of a stiff, strong arm. Charles had returned to his absorbent posture, chin in hand.

39: Uninvited Guest

ALTHOUGH towards the end of November Margaret received news that Maurice’s wife was pregnant it was not until Christmas that we saw her. Meanwhile Margaret, whom I have never known beg for favours except for her elder son, was shamelessly using any influence either of us possessed to get him a job in London. She wasn’t searching for anything lofty – just the equivalent of what he was doing in the Manchester hospital or perhaps a clerkship in an almoner’s office. ‘Though I expect he’d think that was too soft an option for him, wouldn’t he?’ she said. She was smiling, making a decent show of being sarcastic, but underneath the sarcasm melted away.

Still, she was being practical. When the baby was born, she was determined to be within reach. Expecting what? Her moods oscillated as I watched them; some moments she was very happy, almost triumphant, as she had been when she was pregnant herself; at others she was dreading, with a rational dread with which I was touched myself, that the child would be born afflicted. Yes, there was a chance, said some of the medical scientists, told of the mother’s family history. Not worse than one in four, perhaps better than one in sixteen. But these were worse odds than one got in any of the ordinary risks of life.

Whatever could be done, Margaret was doing. From the beginning the child was to have the best doctors, whether Maurice and his wife liked it or not. I told her she was behaving like old Mr March in his heyday (I should have mentioned Azik Schiff too, if this conversation had happened three months earlier). Margaret replied, ‘You know what I feel about his marriage, you haven’t needed telling, have you?’ Just for once she was asking for pity or even pitying herself. ‘Well, if they get a healthy child, that’ll make up for everything, I swear I’ll be good to it. And to her as well.’

‘So you will if the child is born – unlucky,’ I said. ‘Even more so.’

I meant it. There were some, including Margaret, who thought that her son Maurice was naturally good. Margaret had more original sin, maybe, but she made herself good by effort. There was no one who would behave better and more patiently – though she wasn’t patient by nature – if the baby was what she often feared. She would cherish it and its mother, so that everyone thought such love came easy to her.

She had invited them to stay over Christmas with us, and on Christmas Eve we had what by courtesy one could call a family dinner party – with Margaret and me, Maurice and Diana, Charles and Muriel. Until recently that had been a night when we had often filled the flat with a mass all comers’ party. But, because I was surreptitiously as atavistic or superstitious as my mother, we had killed the custom dead. On 23 December 1963, George Passant had called on me and had, not broken, but declared the news which still at times hag-rode me: which had cut off any thoughts about one whole phase of my youth. The following night, I had had to be host to one of those mass parties. Not again. That was four years before, and the memory was still sharp and shrivelling.

And yet, as we sat at dinner, I would almost have welcomed a crowd of people trampling in soon. Diana took her place at my right hand, sidling in with her head down, giving out an air of being ill-treated, injured, self-regarding and full of conceit. I had suspected it the first time I met her: now I couldn’t miss it. Margaret had, half-heartedly to be sure, accused me of being hard on her. That I couldn’t take. If I pretended not to see her as I did, who was that a kindness to? I wasn’t going to patronise her. In fact, as Margaret had discovered that afternoon, she wasn’t at all easy to patronise, even for the most necessary of purposes.

To begin with, she had enjoyed being made such a fuss of, which Margaret was doing, spontaneously and happily, as soon as they arrived. Wonderful about the child. Margaret’s sister had no children. Margaret had the two boys. In Margaret’s family this would be the first child of the new generation. Diana was frowning to understand, but Maurice did some explaining. When she had gathered in the praise, she tossed her head, just as I remembered girls at a palais de danse in the provinces when I was a youth, giving the same response when they were asked for a dance. It didn’t mean they were going to refuse. It meant that they would graciously accept, saying in the phrase which I had heard not long since from the lips of Muriel’s mother, ‘I don’t mind if I do.’

Margaret was not used to north-country manners, but she detected that Diana was pleased. On the other hand, she didn’t detect that when Diana was pleased she did not become less obstinate but more. So that, immediately the prospect of a move to London was conveyed to her (by this time Margaret had three different offers arranged for), she refused point-blank. ‘I don’t see why we should.’

Maurice had to placate her. He might have been overconsiderate or even too diffident (for it was he who did the wooing), but it was clear he hadn’t mentioned the possibility, though his mother had been writing to him about it, and his replies had been grateful and willing.

‘It might be a good idea, sweetie,’ he said.

‘That’s as may be. I don’t see why we should.’

Well, they would be nearer to his family and friends. To which she replied, with truculent accuracy, that they would be further from her family and friends.

Doctors, Margaret was speaking of. She could recommend some of the best –

‘We’ve got doctors where we live. Ours aren’t that bad.’

By this time Margaret realised that this wasn’t shadow-boxing. In a mother-cum-sister fashion she began to speak of the flukes of childbirth, how she was certain that Diana wasn’t frightened of anything, but it would take a load off her (Margaret’s) mind if they took some precautions. She would feel happier – she didn’t approve of herself and she didn’t expect them to, but they might humour her – if they didn’t have the baby on the National Health. There was a good nursing home where she had had Charles –

Diana sat with an internal smile, looking deferred to and unmoved.

As a result, when she came to the dinner table, she was the centre of attention. As usual, she was wearing a dress in dingy chocolate brown, a colour for which she seemed to have a strong predilection.

In my eyes, she was plain, not ugly but plain, and the other young people were all personable, her husband much more than that, the most handsome man of his age whom I had seen in that room. Still, by a process of group hypnosis, it was she whom everyone was making up to and was anxious to please.

I had had a word with Charles on our own before dinner, and told him, for his mother’s sake, to do his best. He gave a workmanlike smile, and as he sat by her at the table, I was surprised to see how good his best could be. I had heard from his friends that he took much trouble to help: when he hadn’t a purpose of his own, he had, so they suggested, a lot of free energy, which he would dispense on anyone, without much favouritism or horns-and-halo partiality, who seemed to need it.

Certainly he was making more progress with Diana than any of us. I heard him begin on the attractions of London. Well, that might soften her some time, I thought, concerned for Margaret. As for myself, I shouldn’t have been sorry for that dinner party to be broken up. I was sitting between Diana with whom I couldn’t communicate and who showed no desire to communicate with me – and Muriel, with whom I could communicate, but who had communicated much that we couldn’t mention at that table, so that we were shy and abrupt with each other.

After dinner, Diana was sitting on the sofa between her husband and Charles. She was still being courted by Charles, but his conversational energies were flagging. Maurice watched with an affectionate smile, apparently gratified that she was receiving so much attention. The rest of us scattered round the room, Muriel preoccupied, Margaret once or twice glancing at me as though wishing that she and I had been trained to do simple conjuring tricks. It was about a quarter past nine, just about the time when, before the George Passant trauma, the first big wave of the Christmas party came breaking in. I asked round the room whether anyone would like more to drink. No takers. With someone to join me, I should have been ready to drink a good deal, which nowadays I rarely did.

Then there was a ring at the front-door bell. While Margaret and I were speculating – it wouldn’t be a visitor, perhaps a Christmas delivery from a shop – Charles went out to answer. A voice from the hall. He returned, looking not self-possessed but clouded, followed by his cousin Pat.

‘Hallo, Aunt Meg!’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Hallo, Uncle Lew!’ He made a bow, ceremonious and stately, to his former wife. He shook hands with the other two, and stood in the middle of the room, brown eyes bright, vigilant and defiant, rocking springily on his heels.

‘What are you doing in London?’ I was the first to speak to him.

‘Oh, I just thought there might be a party on.’

That couldn’t be true. He knew, as well as anyone there, that the old parties had been suspended for four years past. He didn’t even bother to make the pretext plausible.

Where was his wife, Margaret asked. That was his second wife, Vicky, whom we liked much more than we liked Pat. Oh, she was in Cambridge with his father. He (Pat) would drive down and join them late that night.

‘Who else do you think is there?’ He darted the question at his cousin with the sparkle of one who held the initiative and intended to keep it.

‘How do I know?’ Charles was gruff.

‘A friend of yours.’

Charles made no response.

‘A boy called Grenfell.’

‘Is he, by God?’ Charles couldn’t keep back a flash of interest. ‘I have a tiny suspicion – of course that may just be me – but a tiny suspicion that my lady mother fancies that he might be rather a good match.’

Smiles, reluctant, wintry, but nevertheless smiles from Margaret and Muriel. Maurice, who had often defended Pat, said amiably: ‘What does Nina think?’

‘My dear sister doesn’t give a thought to such mundane things.’ Pause. ‘That doesn’t mean, though, that she won’t snaffle him.’

More shamefaced smiles. His deserts might be small, no guest had ever appeared more often uninvited, but there was no denying that he had brightened the evening. But why had he come? Not to indulge in mild malice at the expense of his family. Not even to bring out miscellaneous items of news, regardless of accuracy. Was he there simply out of inquisitiveness? Or mischief making? (In the midst of his high jinks, his eyes strayed more than once in the direction of Muriel.) More likely, I thought, it was nothing more than one of his whims.

When he had sat down, taking a chair midway between Muriel and Charles, and been given a glass of the Christmas champagne, he began telling me about my native town. For, since he had at last married Vicky, he had been living there, supported, one presumed, by Vicky’s earnings as a doctor. It was strange to have those two as my only link with that place. Particularly as Pat’s news, though it might be inaccurate, had a knack of being disconcerting. He had been seeing the Patemans, father and son. With glee he told me that they were inclined to think that I had ‘let them down’. Particularly Pateman senior. He had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a ‘man you could rely on’. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ was Mr Pateman’s considered view of my intervention in his affairs. Unless, and this was more sinister, I had my own reasons for not helping him as he patently deserved.

I cursed. When I thought of the time and trouble, and even the money, that I had spent on that man – the hours in that horrible back room of his, listening to the grating voice.

Margaret and Charles, who knew the whole story, were laughing out loud at me. They couldn’t understand how I had put up with him. I was supposed to be realistic: I had heard him speak with disapproval, rancour and hate of everyone who had helped him: and here I was, upset when I found he was doing the same about me.

While they were laughing, I noticed Pat address Muriel directly for the first time. I didn’t pick up the question, but across the room came Muriel’s clear reply.

‘Very well.’

By this time, Charles, cutting his laughter short, was attending. We all heard Pat continue:

‘How’s the new house?’

‘Doing very nicely, thank you.’

Charles put in: ‘It’s very comfortable to live in.’

If he had been older, he might have left that alone, I thought. He need not have impressed the situation upon Pat – who certainly knew, not only that Charles was living in the house, but also the exact date when he moved in.

‘I’m very very glad that’s worked, I really am.’ Pat was still speaking to Muriel, with great earnestness, as though he had been deeply concerned about the practicability of the house. Yet there was a streak of ambiguity, as if he just conceivably might not be referring to the house at all.

Muriel had been answering with unflurried coolness. I doubted whether an outsider, judging from her manner alone, could have imagined that they had ever been married. It sounded as though he might not have been inside Chester Row, though I knew he had been, at least once, to pay a dutiful visit to the baby. When he did so, his manner wouldn’t have varied, it would have been precisely as it was now.

Pat turned, like a friend of the family, to Charles.

‘How’s the work going, Carlo?’

Just as Charles had seen the beauty of Mr Pateman’s behaviour, so I saw the beauty of this. Pat had done no work either at Cambridge or the College of Art, and had been ejected from each: Charles worked like a scholar. Now Pat was enquiring with an expression of faintly worried responsibility, like an elder person concerned about an undergraduate’s progress.

‘Well enough.’ Charles sounded oddly gauche, unable to match Muriel’s style.

‘Never mind, you won’t have to stand it much longer.’

‘You needn’t worry about me.’

‘My dear Carlo, of course we do, we all do, you know that, don’t you?’

Charles muttered something. It was a long time since I had seen him at such a disadvantage. The rest of us were embarrassed – or more uneasy than that – at Pat’s display. I for one couldn’t tell whether it was effrontery for the sake of effrontery or whether there were double meanings.

‘Of course you’ll soon be going out into the great wide world, won’t you?’

‘Who knows?’ Charles tried to be casual.

‘Why shouldn’t you?’ Pat gave him a knowledgeable nudging smile. ‘We all know that there’s some money coming to you before long. After all you’ll be twenty-one in a year and a bit, isn’t it? Then you can do what you damned well please.’

Here I was taken off guard. The only persons who should have known about the trust for Charles were Margaret, the trustees, who were lawyers, Muriel, whom I had told, and Charles himself

‘You know, you can get married if you want, can’t you?’ said Pat.

Charles didn’t reply.

‘You two can get married soon, there’s nothing to stop you, is there?’

This had to stop. But neither Margaret nor I were much more effective than Charles. It was Maurice who said: ‘Don’t bother, Pat, everything will be all right, he’ll be fine.’

Whether that would have stopped Pat before, one couldn’t tell. Perhaps he had gone as far as he intended. He went on with minor semi-affectionate jabs at Charles, but nothing outrageous. Among those who were listening, there was one curious feature. Muriel was not taut; she wasn’t even cool or blank-faced: she was smiling, like one who, used to this kind of scene, was ready to laugh it off.

Not so much later, Diana, who could have thought that the attention had faded from her, announced to Maurice that she wanted to go to bed. Seizing on the excuse, I was on my feet. I heard Pat talking to Muriel and Charles. He could drive them to Chester Row. It would be no trouble, he wouldn’t get to Cambridge anyway until the early morning. It was clear that he intended to go into the house with them, as though nothing ought to be allowed to separate the trio.

When we were in our bedroom, door shut, safe by ourselves, Margaret sat on the bed and exclaimed: ‘God, what a night.’

I said I’d had more than enough of Christmas Eves.

‘I take it’, said Margaret, ‘that nephew of yours is trying to break up their marriage?’

‘It looks like it,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘He might be after her again himself. It might be sheer devilry.’

‘If it wasn’t for Martin,’ she said, ‘I’d get rid of him for good.’

She looked reflective, and went on: ‘Once, you know, I’d have been glad for anyone, even if it was that little snake, to get Carlo out of her hands.’

She added: ‘I don’t know, now I sometimes think I’m getting reconciled to her.’

Before we went to sleep, after we had talked over Maurice and his wife, soothing ourselves with the inquest, Margaret said: ‘I wonder if any single one of us got what he wanted tonight?’

40: Call No Man Happy Until…

AFTER Christmas we did not see Maurice again, and Charles only for an hour or two, during the rest of the winter. Letters from Maurice were, however, arriving often, and untypically they were businesslike letters; for, to my surprise if no one else’s, Margaret had got her way, and Maurice and his wife were moving to London after Easter, well before the child was due. Whether this was a success for Charles’ persuasive powers, none of us could tell: but certainly he not only cajoled Diana on Christmas Eve, but had persisted, spending a weekend with them in Manchester to do so.

There was also another kind of cajolery going on. Pat, so we heard, had been seen with Charles in Cambridge, and Muriel told me, as a matter of fact, without explanation, that he had called on her twice when she was alone. She said nothing more, but it had all the appearance of a deliberate campaign. With labile characters such as Pat, the line was precarious (as I had learned with bitterness much earlier in my life) between being a busybody and being destructive for destructiveness’ sake.

In January, I had heard something which made our family seem lucky. For some reason that went out of mind, I had been dining by myself at the Athenaeum. Towards the end of my meal, I was staring out of the window at the reflection of the table lights, when someone close by uttered my name. It was Leonard Getliffe.

‘I’m very glad to see you, Lewis. I was going to ring you up.’

I asked him to help me finish the wine, which he wouldn’t: he sat down on the opposite side of the table.

‘I wanted to tell you about my father,’ he said.

His clever conceptualiser’s face looked cheerful, and at the sight of him I felt so myself.

‘He’s been ill. Oh, it’s coming out all right, we’re all delighted. But it’s important that the news shouldn’t get around.’

I said that I had had some practice in guarding the news of illnesses, including my own.

‘We thought of telling you when it happened. Three or four months ago. But we decided that the possibility of leakage was directly proportional to the number of people who knew.’

That might be statistically true, I was thinking. It was also somewhat bleak to tell to a man’s oldest friend. But Leonard wasn’t really being bleak, he was indulging in what his colleagues called cat-humour.

Francis hadn’t been specially well all the summer.

At Viredoux (that was the house in Provence) he’d been coughing a lot, but he said it was bronchitis. He used to have it in Cambridge, you know, that was one of the reasons for taking a pied-à-terre somewhere else.

Leonard went on: ‘Well, he wasn’t feeling quite up to coming back at the beginning of last term. So Katherine persuaded him, he’d always hated the idea of doctors of course, to go and let them look him over in Nîmes.’

‘Yes?’

‘They found he had a spot on one lung. They operated at once, very skilfully, Francis says. He has a lot of use for their experimental technique. It was perfectly successful. He’s convalescing down there now. It’ll be a bit of time before he’s back to optimum form, but he’s remarkably well. His morale is very high and he’s fretting about not being back at the lab. He’s feeling stronger every day. We’re all extremely pleased with him. I think we were more worried than he was, but that’s gone now. We want to get him back in Cambridge by April. He’s very eager to see you, by the by.’

I tried to show no sign of disbelief as I gazed into the intelligent innocent face. From the moment he mentioned the operation, I had been horrified. Perhaps, I wanted to think, old anxieties were running away with me, Leonard might be right, Francis was not a self-deceiver.

I could not shift my own mood for an instant. I found Leonard’s euphoria dismaying, and anything he said of Francis’. After a few flat questions – I did not want to puncture Leonard’s well-being, but I could not, for premonition’s sake, not honesty’s – give any expression of pleasure or relief – I made an excuse, and went home.

As soon as I arrived there, I telephoned Charles March. Since old Mr March’s death, Charles had been reconciled to his sister and her husband, but it was the kind of reconciliation in which the years of difference were covered up, not eliminated or transformed. Still, he might have heard from them.

When I asked, that turned out to be true. What did he think, as a doctor?

There was a long pause at the other end. ‘I haven’t enough to go on, I haven’t even seen him. One’s opinion isn’t much use–’

Charles was growing more hesitant as he passed into his sixties. The fire and devil of his youth – and the unfairness – did not often show. He was more inclined to speak like a responsible citizen who didn’t want to be quoted.

‘No, but what is it? I want to know what you think, that’s all.’

Another long pause.

‘If it were you or me, I doubt if we should be as optimistic as they are.’

‘No.’

‘Mind, sometimes these operations really work.’ Charles mentioned some cases of cancer which he had seen.

‘How would you put his chances?’

He refused to make a guess. Then he said: ‘If what you’re afraid of did happen – and you know I’m as afraid of it as you are – then I’m terribly worried for Katherine. She loves her children, but he’s been her whole life.’

That same night, I wrote to her, carefully casual, saying I had just seen Leonard and was hoping that all continued well. A reply came about a fortnight later, from Francis himself, as euphoric as Leonard’s report had been. Of course, he couldn’t expect to get all his strength back overnight; it would take months rather than weeks; but they would expect Margaret and me in Cambridge in the summer. With a blend of invalid concentration and scientific interest, he enclosed a sketch of the original X-ray of his lungs, and a diagram showing how the surgeons had operated.

That letter arrived at the beginning of February. In April – our own family concerns still, so far as we knew, unchanged – came one from Katherine. In her bold and steady hand, it read: ‘All the children have had to be told, and I have also written to my brother. I’m sure that Francis would think that you ought to know too. He has not been so well for two or three weeks past, and last weekend went into hospital again. The disease has spread to the other lung and has advanced quickly there. There is nothing to say except that this promises badly. Francis has a desire to return home. The hospital people are trying to resist this, but I cannot see that they have any reason on their side.’

At the end of May, just at the time when the examination results were coming out, a telegram from Cambridge:

Francis died peacefully this morning Katherine Leonard Lionel Mary Penelope

The obituary notices were the longest of those for any of my friends, but they were stiff, a record of achievement, as though Francis’ public persona had warded off the writers from coming anywhere near him. A few personal notes followed, a surprisingly warm one from L of S (Luke of Salcombe), one from me. The funeral was private. That seemed to be the end.

Then in the post arrived the neat little envelope, the printed slip, announcing a memorial service after a Cambridge death. How many services for fellows of the colleges in my time? Vernon Royce, Roy Calvert, Despard-Smith, Eustace Pilbrow, C P Crystal, Winslow, Paul Jago, Crawford, M H L Gay. But this was the one I least expected to hear of. Even after I was anticipating Francis’ death. For he was the firmest of unbelievers, who didn’t attend memorial services for others and would have repudiated one such for himself. True, he had made a kind of apology for not going to Roy Calvert’s, but that had been a gesture of consolation to me, perhaps of regret that he had not liked Roy better. When that had happened, and we were all young men, I had not imagined, in the midst of grief, that one day I should be attending a service for Francis himself. Nor could I have imagined that I should feel such a sense of loss.

Staying in Martin’s house, within the college precincts, the night before the service, I confessed, what Margaret already knew, that I was sad in a way I didn’t look for. After all, at my age one had seen enough of death. Including one’s own, said Martin, with his own brand of Nordic irony. Including one’s own, I agreed. Oh, be quiet, said Irene, who had become fond of me, now that she was middle aged.

Margaret had spent the afternoon with Katherine, and was silent now.

Through the open window of Martin’s drawing-room, we could hear shouts in the court below. Glancing down, I caught sight of a posse of young men jostling along the path, some of them carrying suitcases. Another young man was walking between a middle-aged couple, perhaps his parents. That had been the last of the degree days, one of the less dramatic ritual occasions, graduates kneeling before the Vice-Chancellor and then being congratulated by tutors with meaningless heartiness on a feat which had been public knowledge some weeks before. In my time, the ceremony was becoming obsolescent, the independent young did not bother to attend: yet those below had been participating, somehow it still survived.

Although the sky was clear, turning dense indigo to the east, away from the sunset, it had been raining during the afternoon. The night seemed warmish, which we were not used to in that wet and frigid summer. There blew in wafts of flower scents, strong in the humid air. The smell of syringa, tantalising, aphrodisiac, poignant, prevailed over the rest. It brought back, not a memory, but a kind of vague disquiet: if I could remember an occasion when I had smelt the syringa so – Perhaps in that place? No, I couldn’t trace it. Just the scent, unease, the sensual knowledge that there had been other nights like this.

We had already heard from Martin how the memorial service had come about. As soon as Francis was dead, the Master, G S Clark, had been pressing condolences upon Katherine. The fact that he had detested Francis, and that Francis had not been overindulgent in return, seemed only to have enhanced the Master’s compassion. In his ardour, he had insisted there should be a service. Katherine believed as little as Francis and must have known his wishes: so did Leonard and the rest of the Getliffe family. The Master had borne them down.

It wasn’t that Katherine was as yet deadened by sorrow: on the contrary, having had to watch her husband through the long illness, she had returned to a kind of activity, an illusory vigour that might not last her long. She had argued about the service, and so had the family, but the truth was, they all wanted to agree.

They were holding on to anything that kept Francis in others’ minds: or perhaps, more primitive than that, they had the feeling that while his name was being mentioned he was not quite obliterated, his shadow (they would have liked to say his spirit or his ghost) was still there. Just as Martin himself had returned to a primitive piety when our father died, and had proposed that he should be buried according to religious rites in which Martin was the last person to believe.

Once Clark had won the Getliffes over, there followed one of the traditional college struggles, though for kindness’ sake Martin had let none of this reach Leonard, not to speak of Katherine. The question was, who was to give the memorial address? In the past this had been the prerogative of old Despard-Smith, the only fellow then in orders. With the result that he had made the oration over Roy Calvert, for whom he cherished extreme and ominous disapproval. Now, by a grisly coincidence, the pattern was repeating itself. There was at present no fellow in orders. So the Master assumed it was his own prescriptive right to make memorial orations. He had every intention of doing so for Francis Getliffe, for whom in life he had scarcely had one amiable thought.

Martin couldn’t explain why Clark was so set on this. It might have been he couldn’t resist, Martin suggested, ‘getting into the act’: after all, Francis was an eminent man. Or it might have been Christian charity. Martin, who was no more disposed to give Clark the benefit of the doubt than Francis had been, did not regard that suggestion of his own with favour.

In any case, Clark’s address was not to happen. Feeling ran round the college, for Francis had become revered by most of the younger fellows. And Arthur Brown, the elder statesman, seventy-seven years old, was deputed to make representations to the Master. Over Roy Calvert’s memorial service, Arthur Brown had tried to displace Despard-Smith, and had failed. This time in old age, the senior fellow since the death of Gay, Arthur was happy to have another go. He was himself, so Martin said, as moved as the younger men. He had a good deal of affection, and more respect, for Francis, despite his affiliations with a government which Arthur was increasingly prone to describe in terms that a Russian émigré in 1920 might have considered sensible as applied to Lenin’s administration, but perhaps a little over-strong. As for Arthur’s opinion of the Master, he would not have mentioned that except to one of his old allies, and they had died or left the college, leaving him alone.

The upshot was that Arthur Brown had emerged from the Lodge, looking contented but flushed, and told the protesters that he would deliver the oration himself. ‘It won’t be exactly a rabble-rouser,’ Martin had said that evening when he told the story, ‘but it’ll be perfectly decent. Which is more than we had a right to expect.’

Since we arrived, Martin and Irene had been waiting to tell us their own news. Irene had known Francis only as an acquaintance, and wasn’t pretending to more than a social sorrow. Martin had lost a friend, and more significantly, an ally, but you could lose friends and allies and still enjoy your joys within the next half hour. Unlike me, Martin had not known Francis for a lifetime. I was absent-minded, even when they felt that deference to mourning had been duly paid.

I was absent-minded, thinking of that occasion in hospital when Francis had said that if I died he would miss me. At the time it had sounded unusually unrestrained for Francis, and simultaneously a little inadequate and a little sentimental. Now I could test it for myself. He had known better than I had. I was already missing him. No more, no less. It wasn’t the fierce and comminatory grief which came like a brainstorm or illness at the death of someone you loved. This was different. Someone you had known for a lifetime. Missing was the right word. To say any more would have been sentimental: but so would to say any less.

Meanwhile, Martin and Irene hadn’t been able to suppress their triumph. The day before, Nina had become engaged to Guy Grenfell. All tied up and formal. The announcement would appear in The Times later that week. There had been family conferences and negotiations because she was so young.

I had seldom seen my brother look so happy. It seemed that all those disappointments and humiliations over his son had been cancelled. It was a pleasingly sarcastic flick – very much in his own style, though he wouldn’t have been grateful for being reminded of it now – that this should happen through the daughter to whom until recently he had given casual affection but not much more.

‘Old Grenfell’, he said, ‘isn’t a bad old creature. Eton, and the Brigade, and the City. But he’s not very good at chairing a meeting. There was him and his wife, the two of us, and the young couple. It was a pretty fatal combination for getting anything done quickly. There was only one thing to settle, ought they to wait a year or not?’

‘I’d been around more than she has before I was her age,’ said Irene with a lively lubricious grin.

‘You weren’t marrying into a respectable family, my girl.’ Martin’s smile was congratulatory, as though addressed not only to his wife but to Nina’s mother.

‘We haven’t any money, of course,’ Martin went on. ‘That was made quite clear. It seemed to puzzle Mrs G. They have quite a lot of money. That was also made quite clear. And that seemed a very reasonable state of things to Mrs G. Somehow it also seemed a rather strong argument to her for them to wait until she’s twenty-one. Old G didn’t quite see the logical connection, but he felt there was some force in it.’

He said, face illumined from inside, as it appeared when for once his self-control had slipped: ‘But they could have argued till the sun blows up, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The girl and boy were fine. I thought Guy was a bit of a wet when she first brought him here, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was like a rock. Very polite, long hair and all, but like a rock. He was apologetic, but they were going to get married in August. They were absolutely sure. They didn’t want to be awkward, but they were absolutely sure. They would make any concessions – they’d even have a smart wedding if that would give any pleasure – they didn’t want to disappoint anyone, so long as they were married in August.’

Martin was extracting pleasure, more even than Irene, from the last detail of their daughter’s engagement. He was fundamentally a healthy man, despite his pessimism – or perhaps it was because he was healthy that he could let his pessimism rip. My thoughts cast back to Francis: he too had rejoiced when each of his children married: it was part of the flow, there was a proper time to become a patriarch. Now Martin, whom occasionally I still regarded as my young brother, was enjoying that same proper time. It wasn’t made worse (as he had commented, executing a complex gibe against himself, the worldly people in general, and the worldliness of the world) because Guy was by the standard of Martin’s society, a distinctly desirable husband. Martin had had, in all external things and in some closer to him, less luck than most of us. It was good to hear him saying, without any reserve, tight lip all gone, that this was luck he hadn’t counted on.

He said something else, which made me feel that I had been facile in thinking about Guy. I had assumed that he was a rich young man who relished talk of world convulsions, so long as they took place in drawing-rooms. I remembered predicting to Charles that he would finish up in a merchant bank. So far, said Martin, there was no sign of that. He was trying to find a job in famine relief. And was being held up, by a beautiful piece of security machinery, because of his part in last year’s revolt.

No doubt their elders would go on waiting for Charles’ circle to renege. As yet, none had done so. The only half exception was the leader, Olly, who had recently been chosen as a Labour candidate; but as he was standing in one of the richest constituencies in London, he couldn’t be said to have compromised with professional politics yet awhile.

Next morning, from Martin’s drawing-room, we heard the chapel bell begin to toll. Charles had joined us there, after spending the previous night in his own college, packing ready to depart: he was wearing a black tie, as Martin and I were. As we walked along the paths through the college, other parties were converging on the chapel, women in black, like Margaret and Irene. It was all as it used to be for other memorial services, all as it was for Roy’s. Through the great gate, a group of a dozen people were entering, and the first court’s flags were jolted by a man moving slowly, as though in time with some inaudible march, clothes and gowns dark in the bright shower-washed sunlight. The grass on the lawn was so green, the eyes dazzled.

The chapel, its interior Georgian and seemly, was already full. Seats had been reserved for fellows and sometime fellows and their families, and we took up ours. Opposite sat Katherine, in a grey dress, not in full mourning, the Getliffe sons and daughters, their wives and husbands. Charles and Ann March were close by, and others of Katherine’s family. Chairs had been placed in the antechapel, under which some early Masters had been buried (and where old Gay had expressed a wish, not honoured, to lie himself). The moulded doors had been left open, and from our seats we could see the antechapel also full, with young men standing. Most of the faces, having been so long away from Cambridge, I didn’t know. Some of them must have been from Francis’ own laboratory, and I recognised one or two senior scientists from the Cavendish. There were several ministers, officers in uniform, civil servants, reminders of the strata of Francis’ public life. One pair I saw, inconspicuous in the distance, Roger Quaife and his wife.

(It was I thought later, a slice of official, or functional, England, but not one that the young were familiar with. Few people there were likely to be mentioned in gossip columns and fewer were rich. Some of the scientists had creative work of the highest order to their credit, but a young man as well informed as Gordon Bestwick would scarcely know their names.)

A hymn. A prayer: the kind of prayer, I thought, that one heard at American ceremonies, designed not to give offence to any religion. Another hymn. Then Arthur Brown, surpliced, hooded, bejowled, high-coloured, mounted the pulpit. He mounted with firm heavy steps. He had always been heavy, but getting towards eighty he was hale and carried his stomach high.

In a strong voice, vowels well rounded, he began. He began much as we expected. Yes, we were thinking, it won’t be exciting, but it will be acceptable. About how Francis had been a pillar of the college, the university, the scientific community, the state. About how he was a man so just that some had thought him overnice. ‘But no juster man has ever walked the courts of this college.’ About how he was absolutely upright in all his dealings. ‘He was the most scrupulous of colleagues. As well as being one of the three or four most eminent members of our society during the present century.’

All that was good enough. Orotund, like Arthur Brown in public. More from the outside than he could be, talking with slow cunning about someone he knew well. Perhaps he had never known Francis well. Or not noticed the struggle between the disciplined and the acerb.

Then Arthur Brown clutched the lectern, looked down the chapel, right out through the doors, with a hard, dark, resolute gaze. ‘Now I have to speak in a way which may be painful for some present. But if I did not, it would be hypocrisy on my part, and hypocrisy of a kind which our colleague would have been one of the first to resent. I have to tell you that he was not a Christian. He did not believe in the religion to which this chapel is dedicated, and which some of us here profess. What is more, he did not believe in a religion of any kind. He was an utterly truthful man, and he would not compromise on this matter. So far as I can remember, he entered this chapel only for the purposes of electing a Master, that is only twice in his whole life. I am certain, that if he had honoured us by becoming our Master himself, he would not have felt able to perform any ceremonial duties within the chapel.’ Anyone who knew Arthur Brown must have been astonished. All his life he had been confining himself to emollient and cautious words. He had much dislike for the brash or those who said ‘something out of place’. Civility meant being careful: one’s own convictions and much less one’s self-expressions were no excuse for embarrassing others. But now – how much effort had it cost him? – he was letting go. Perhaps with a touch of defiance (that last remark about Francis’ not taking the Mastership was not calculated to give pleasure to the present occupant, sitting in the magisterial pew) such as the prudent felt when, just for once, they were not being prudent: but more so out of duty to a dead man.

‘And I cannot and will not talk of him in terms of the Christian virtues. It is more appropriate to talk and think of him in terms of a world before Christianity existed.

‘He was the absolutely upright man, such as the classical world admired. His life would have been a model to them: it is easy to imagine Lucretius saying that this was how a man should be. I wish to say that to you myself, but I was not prepared to let you hear it on false pretences. He lived a life better than most of us can aspire to, but he did it without the support of any faith.

‘I wish to press another thought upon you. He was, in his later years, a very happy man. Earlier he had his struggles – struggles for a better world in which some of us cannot believe, struggles on behalf of his country where we are all grateful to him. He had throughout the blessing of an ideally happy marriage, and he was doubly blessed in a family of exceptional gifts. All our sympathy goes out to his wife and children, but they should have the consolation of being certain how happy they made his life. For years past he lived in an Indian summer. He was not a man easily contented, but he had become totally contented. His scientific work had received full recognition. Only last year he was awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society, the highest honour that the Society can give. In these past years he had private happiness and the esteem of his peers to an extent which is not granted to many men.

‘It is because of that I am presuming to offer what may be another small consolation to those who loved him. Life is always uncertain, as they have too much reason to know. Even that happiness of his might have been broken. There is a word from the classical world which he would have appreciated: Call no man happy until he is dead. It is little comfort to those who have lost him, but sometimes perhaps they will be able to tell themselves that he left them with his felicity unbroken.’

I was gazing at Katherine, whose fine features, strong and not congruent with the matronly form, had not stirred. Arthur Brown had been through serious illness: but had he known what it was like to be warned about his death? Or what Francis felt in his last months? Call no man happy…what did that sound like to those who had been close by? I had heard very little about the final illness. Either Arthur Brown had forgotten both his realism and his tact, or else he had found out more.

He retired, his tread audible in the silent chapel, from the pulpit to his place. Hymn. Prayer. The fellows began to file out, the Master stopping beside the Getliffes so as to ask them to go first. In the court, knots of people were gathering on the flagstones. The Master nodded to Arthur Brown, but did not speak. Nor did Nightingale, the only other man besides Brown who had remained a fellow from my time to this.

Katherine had, however, shaken Brown’s hand, and the Getliffe family were clustering round him. All seemed pleased, and without qualms. In the crowd, Margaret was talking to an old acquaintance, the Getliffes were being joined by colleagues of Francis, and I hung about waiting for a chance to speak with Arthur Brown.

When we were able to move off, the two of us, out of the ruck, I said: ‘Well done.’

‘I hope Francis would have liked it.’

‘I’m sure he would.’ Francis wouldn’t have been above thinking that, if G S Clark and Nightingale were affronted, not only as personal enemies, but also as religious devotees, so much the better. I didn’t say that to Arthur, who was a latitudinarian member of the Church of England: disapproving of ‘enthusiasm’, though, very much as his nineteenth-century predecessors had done.

‘Old friend,’ said Arthur, ‘he’ll leave a gap here, you know. We’re dropping off one by one.’

He was speaking with regret, or nostalgia, but not like an old man. He went on: ‘I wish you hadn’t gone away from us, Lewis. Oh, I know you couldn’t have done what you had to do if you’d stayed. But still – this isn’t quite the place it was.’

I said, with the whole university expanding, it couldn’t be –

‘I dare say it’s better, but it isn’t quite the same. It’s not very loyal to criticise, because the college has been enormously kind to me, it has given me so much more than I deserved.’ That was not mock modesty, but the real thing: Arthur had never had much opinion of himself.

‘But I can’t get used to changes. I’ve reached the stage when I don’t really enjoy a person’s company unless I’ve known him for a long time.’

I said: ‘I’ve found young Charles’ friends a bit refreshing–’

‘Ah. That reminds me.’ Suddenly Arthur had brightened up. ‘I did want to have a word with you about that young man. Just for your ear alone. He’s done perfectly splendidly, of course. It did occur to me that we might manage to construct a vacancy for him here. Mind you, I can’t promise anything. I couldn’t think of guaranteeing anything until I’d found out how the land was lying. There are some people who mightn’t be entirely favourable. But there might be a chance that we should turn out too strong for them–’

With a touch of his old zest, with more than a touch of his old labyrinthine pertinacity, Arthur proceeded to examine how the college might be induced to elect Charles to a fellowship before ‘others get in first’. The college had to poach nowadays, especially in subjects like Charles’ which were becoming short of first-class talent. Someone had mentioned another Trinity man called Bestwick, but Arthur didn’t at present feel ‘so keen about him’.

‘Of course,’ Arthur reiterated, ‘this is entirely between ourselves. I can’t possibly promise anything. It might be better if you regarded this conversation as not having happened, at any rate for the time being–’

Then Arthur went up to his rooms, after an affectionate goodbye, still dubious about my discretion and inclined to treat me, as he had always done, as a man of promise not yet old enough or experienced enough to be entirely trustworthy in serious affairs.

Now the court had emptied, Margaret and Martin taking a porter with them to fetch our bags: Charles alone remained, who had earlier transported his own to the porter’s lodge. He came and joined me, at the foot of the staircase which I used to climb.

‘I expect you’re glad that’s all over,’ he said in a quiet and sympathetic tone, indicating the chapel. I nodded.

He hesitated. We had scarcely been alone together since Francis’ death.

‘I didn’t know him well,’ he said. ‘But it was a comfort to feel that he was there.’

That was an epitaph of which Francis might have been glad. Charles went on to mention the memorial address. Didn’t it deserve very high marks for ruffling dovecotes, and putting cats among pigeons? Wouldn’t it be mildly fun to be dining at high table that night? Charles didn’t need telling that this had been the most uncharacteristic gesture – almost the only gesture – of old Arthur’s peace-loving college life.

He did need telling, though, of something which wasn’t at all uncharacteristic, Arthur’s desire to manipulate the college machine on a move, this time on behalf of Charles himself. Charles said: ‘He’s a sweet old man.’

Not always so sweet, when he was in action, I said. Charles was smiling. He gave no indication of whether the offer meant anything to him. Yes or no: or even whether he would, in Arthur’s own old phrase, sleep on it.

On the other hand, he was disturbed that Arthur seemed to have ruled Gordon Bestwick out.

‘What the hell is the matter? If you don’t mind me saying it, this isn’t a great college. By God, they won’t get a chap like Leonard once in ten years–’

Somebody else would take him, I said, but Charles was not appeased.

Couldn’t I use my influence with Arthur to get him to think again? I said, neither I nor anyone else had any influence with Arthur. Once his mind was set, he was as obstinate as a mule.

Charles, not satisfied, was wondering about other approaches. It hadn’t occurred to him, apparently, that Gordon’s reputation as an activist would not be an overpowering inducement to Arthur Brown. Perhaps because Charles did not find his own getting in his way: but then he had been more discreet, and would in any case be forgiven a great deal by Arthur. Anyway, I was relieved that Charles was for once less than acute. I didn’t wish to quarrel about politics that day; nor more did he. He was being easy and friendly, ready either to amuse or soothe or just stay at my side.

We walked, very slowly, clockwise round the court. Looking at the lodge and Hall, lines clear, stone honey-coloured in the sun, I told him what I thought to myself that October evening nearly three years before. When I first saw those buildings, they were grey with the soot of years, and covered with creeper. Now, the theory was, we saw them as when they were built – except that the windows would have been entirely different, the facade of another kind of stone, and the roof of the Hall feet lower. Charles, not specially modernist in visual taste, said: ‘I expect it always looked pretty pleasant, though.’

He added: ‘It’s very handsome, in a quiet way, isn’t it?’

He might have said that to please me, but it was true. He might have said also, but that wouldn’t have come so easy to him – that it was very English. At least, I had never seen anything like it out of England.

In the bedroom of the lodge, a light had been left on, pale and unavailing in the sunshine.

‘You must have walked round here a good few times,’ he said.

‘Yes, quite a few,’

He smiled. ‘In various assorted moods, if I know you.’

‘Yes, that too.’

He couldn’t have divined it, but without any justification at all, since Martin was there to be visited, I had had a feeling, hard-cut, dismissive, that I was seeing the place for the last time.

41: A Bearer of Bad News

IT was a domestic scene such as we had once been used to, and were no longer. Our drawing-room: lights already on, though the time was only nine o’clock, a few days after midsummer. Outside, a cool cloudy evening, for, since the day of Francis’ memorial service, the weather had returned to form. Present, along with me, Margaret and her two sons. It was a family evening which, a few years before, we should have taken for granted and thought nothing of.

As it was, Maurice had come to the flat because his wife had gone into hospital. The baby was a few days overdue, and both he and Margaret were conscious of the telephone beside the door. It was the first time I had seen Maurice show the effects of suspense, or of waiting. In the periods when he had taken examinations, he had, with maddening acceptance, not been anxious about the results, assuming them to be bad: he hadn’t ever appeared worried about someone turning up for an assignation, as the rest of us had been, watching the clock on the restaurant wall, making excuses for the non-arrival, with pique, anger, and with longing.

Now Maurice, though he made no complaint, seemed no better at waiting than anyone else.

His only sign of the old self-forgetfulness came soon after he had met Charles that evening. Maurice had said, gently but unhesitantly, that he hoped Muriel was well and happy. And that he hoped Charles was ‘looking after her’. No one else would have spoken to Charles like that. It might have seemed impertinent, if it hadn’t been said with so little self-assertion. Anyway, Charles took it, though he didn’t make an explicit reply.

Whether Maurice knew or not, Charles had been sleeping in his old bedroom at the flat since less than a week before we returned from Cambridge.

During the daytime he had been nearly always out, possibly with Muriel: one heard him telephoning her each morning. He seemed in high spirits, with patches of contemplativeness. He gave no indication that he also was in a period of waiting.

That evening, as we sat chatting, chatting to induce the telephone to ring, Margaret occasionally gazed at the two of them – her innocent, her strenuous one – and then at me. She might have been thinking of the time we had talked about them in that room. The events of their growing up, commonplace to everyone else as another family’s photographs, at times dramatic, searing rather than dramatic, to us. I recalled (I didn’t have to bring it back to memory, it was always there) the morning when we sat there, having been told that Charles, then an infant, was recovering from meningitis. In thanksgiving, we didn’t speak about him but about Maurice. We repeated, just as we had said in the hospital, we must save him from everything we can. Margaret had been as good as her vow: her love for Maurice had deepened, not grown less, deepened with the trouble he had caused her, not through conflict but through ineptitude or lack of self. As for me, I had tried to follow her. What will could do, I had done. Other men, I thought again that evening, would have done better.

Two days later, the child, a girl, was born. The first medical reports were encouraging. As a newborn baby, she seemed everything she ought to be. Of course, some disabilities they couldn’t test for, yet. It would be weeks or months before they knew. So that one of Margaret’s anxieties was not eliminated, though for the time being assuaged. She couldn’t let herself go, but, trying to suppress it, she was full of joy.

The baby was born on 2 July. The medical opinions reached her next day. That same evening, I was entertaining a foreign acquaintance at a club. When I arrived home, it was quite early, not yet half past ten, but the drawing-room lights were switched off. Margaret called from our bedroom.

She was not undressed, but was sitting on the chair in front of her dressing-table.

‘Carlo has been talking to me,’ she said. ‘I think he’s gone off to tell Muriel.’

‘What is it?’

‘He asked me to tell you. Of course he’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘What is it?’

I knew her face so well, yet it was difficult to read. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks a little flushed. In a temper she sometimes looked like that, but at that moment her temper was cool. ‘He’s come out with his plans. I ought to say that he was extraordinarily nice. He even waited to talk until he knew that I wasn’t anxious about the baby.’ (Just as, I had a recollection, my first wife had once delayed telling me the most wounding news – until I was in good health.) ‘Mind you, I fancy he’s been certain himself for quite a time.’

‘What is it?’

She made me sit down on the bed. She said: ‘My love, a part of this you’re not going to like. Most of it seems perfectly sensible. Anyway it may be right for him.’

Angrily, I told her that I liked news broken fast. I was already ready to punish her for being the bearer of bad news. Sitting there, she seemed more guilty than Charles could be.

‘He has it all worked out.’

Then, quite quickly, she told me. He had decided that he must make a name within a few years. The world was going too fast, he wanted to have some sort of say before he was middle-aged. He had been studying the careers of the American foreign correspondents in the thirties. They had done their piece. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t do as well. Languages weren’t a problem to him. Politics he knew as much about as most people his age. He had no racial feeling, he could live anywhere. He was used to hard travelling –

‘That’s not very dreadful,’ I said. Yes, it might suit him.

‘You haven’t heard it all.’ He was determined to have his say in the minimum possible time. Other people could do what he proposed to do. He had to get his nose in front. Once he was recognised at all, he could rely on – what he was too cautious to call his talent. Though he was right, Margaret said, he had most of the qualities to become a pundit. He wanted to be a sane voice. But, to do that, he had to start with something a bit out of the ordinary –

‘What is it?’ I cried out again.

‘That’s where the risk comes in,’ said Margaret.

‘What risk?’

He accepted that he couldn’t persuade a paper to use him yet awhile, she said. He had to prove himself. So he was setting off to get near the action: meaning, to begin with, the Middle East. He would have to work himself as near battles as he could. Somehow, within a year or two, he was going to find something to sell: then some paper or other would employ him. It wasn’t going to be pleasant. He insisted that he was extremely cowardly. Still, that was part of the exercise. Brave men weren’t specially good at becoming international pundits. He had worked out the odds, and meant to take his chance.

‘Good God,’ I said, ‘how romantic is all this?’

I asked her, still angry with her because she had borne the news, whether she had tried to dissuade him.

‘I said that it wasn’t what I should have chosen for him,’ said Margaret.

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He said that he realised it. And that you wouldn’t have chosen it for him either.’

He had told her also that he had wished all along that he could settle for something which we should like. But you can live only in your own time, he said.

‘And he’s determined to go on with this?’

‘He didn’t tell me in so many words, but I’m sure that the arrangements are already made.’

That rang clear as truth, as soon as I heard it. As with my brother Martin, Charles’ calculations were performed long before he spoke, perhaps before he knew that his own decision was already final.

‘Does he know’, I said, ‘that I shan’t have an easy night until this is over?’

‘Do you think I shall?’

‘That may be for the rest of my life.’

‘Have you forgotten that he’s mine as well as yours?’

For an instant we were blaming each other. She was appealing for me to come close to her: while in pain and rage I was wishing that everyone round us could be torn down, along with me, if this I had to endure. I felt as savage, as possessed as I had in other miseries, not many of them in my entire life, two deaths perhaps, Charles’ own illness. I felt at that moment without relief or softening from age or any consolation that had come to me.

‘Is he thinking of anyone else at all?’

Margaret did not reply.

‘Does he know what it means to anyone else?’

Margaret said: ‘He’s pretty perceptive, and I’m certain that he does.’

‘Is that why he’s doing it?’

Margaret and I glanced at each other, thinking of how we had protected him in his childhood, knowing that we couldn’t have another, telling ourselves that this was a precious life. The first time I saw him in hospital, I had taken him, rolling-eyed, waving-fingered, into my arms, resolved that no harm should come to him.

‘No,’ said Margaret, ‘you mustn’t take more responsibility than you have already.’

She meant, what I had said to her often enough, that affections, especially in families, didn’t carry the same weight on either side. I ought to have known that, from the way I behaved to my mother. It was a kind of vanity to suspect that another’s choices depended on his relations with oneself. Choices, lives, were lonelier than that. Charles was making a choice lonelier than most of ours had been. That was no consolation for me, sitting there in the bedroom. All I could do was think of him, not with affection, not even with concern, but with anger mixed with a kind of fellow feeling, or a brutal sympathy of the flesh.

It took me a long time before I could say to Margaret that I had been cruel, shutting her out when she spoke about Charles as her son, and that without her to tell it, the news would have been worse.

42: Fingertip to Fingertip

THE next morning, Charles did not get up for breakfast, but soon after joined me in the drawing-room. After he had uttered a greeting, bright and neutral, he sat in a chair opposite mine across the disused fireplace.

‘I think Mummy has told you, hasn’t she?’ His tone was easy and intimate: the only sign that he might not be free from strain was that he fell back on that term from childhood.

‘Yes, she has. Last night.’

He said: ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you.’

I did not reply at once and he went on: ‘I’m very sorry. Believe me.’

‘Of course you haven’t disappointed me.’

‘Well,’ he said, more freely now, ‘it isn’t exactly what you might have looked for, is it?’

‘You’ve done far more than I had at your age. With any luck you’ll go on doing more.’

‘I shall need a bit of luck–’

‘Yes, I know that.’

I hadn’t been speaking out of self-control, or even out of resignation. I hadn’t prepared myself for how to meet him, there were none of the speeches which one made up in one’s head and never spoke. In his presence I felt nothing of the anger, or the suspicion, that a few hours before I had projected on to Margaret. To my own astonishment I was buoyed up by – what was it? Maybe his energy or his resolution. Or it might have been his nerve. At no time in my life could I have done what he was committing himself to do. It seemed as though a new force had taken charge.

He must have realised that there were going to be no reproaches. More, he may have seen that a kind of relief, not happiness or content but more like trust, had come into the air between us. Neither of us could have known the reason. Ties, half-memories, the sympathy of those who are close together even where their purposes contradict each other. Later, I wondered whether I was stirred by something of myself which, that morning, had been long forgotten.

When I was younger than Charles, less educated, much less sophisticated, I had once declared my hopes. They had been embarrassing to recall in middle life. Asked by a girl who loved me a little what I wanted, I had said – not to spend my life unknown: love: a better world. Those hopes might have been embarrassing later, but they were true of me at the time I spoke, a good deal truer than any refinements and complications would have been.

Yes, the first of them died on one, or waned. Yet it drove me on for the first half of my life. As for the second, when I said it in that old-fashioned schoolroom, I didn’t have any intimation of where it would lead me, either in the search for sexual love or that other kind, which I felt for my son, sitting there across the fireplace: but it had lasted until now. But the one that I shouldn’t have confessed to, even a few years later, because it sounded so priggish or worse still so innocent, that had been true too.

It wasn’t as passionate as personal desires – nor as haunting as the sense of the ‘I’ alone, oneself alone – but it was there. It had bound Francis Getliffe and me together all our working lives. It led us into defeats and sometimes humiliations, led us either through our temperaments or through a set of chances, into backstairs’ work, secrets, all kinds of closed politics. Of course, it wasn’t pure. Our own self-esteem took part, or certainly mine did. Nevertheless, trying to judge myself as indulgently as Father Ailwyn had instructed me I believed that I had wanted some good things. Whether I had helped to get any, that was another matter. Very little, I had often thought before of Francis and myself. The only work which I was certain had been useful took place in the war, and there we were avoiding a worse world, not making a better one.

Yet some of the pleasure – utterly unanticipated by either of us – which I felt in Charles’ presence that morning, was because he too had the same desire. He too might be rapacious, as much as I had been, and self-absorbed, possibly more. There was, though, something left. It wasn’t the simple and good, such as Maurice, who had vitality to spare for tasks outside themselves. Charles had plenty. He would use it differently from the way I had done. He might be more effective. All might go wrong. He might throw himself away. Still, even the bare desire was like a touch fingertip to fingertip, conducting a phase of life.

I said: ‘I can understand that you’re in a hurry. But can’t you get a footing in some slightly less dramatic way?’

‘You don’t believe I haven’t thought of that?’

‘Well, why not?’

‘It isn’t on.’ Charles gave a rationale, clear and patient, of what he was aiming at. Only in his generation, he said, could you become a spokesman before the age of thirty. But plenty of people, at least as competent as he was, would like to be such a spokesman. To get there, you had to do something special.

‘You’re telling me this is the only way?’

‘I think it is for me. If I were more of a performer, I might find another way in. But I’m not.’

He broke into a friendly smile.

‘Look, you realise that I’m a lot more careful than you are. I have plenty of respect for my valuable life. I don’t even like flying in aircraft much. Let alone in an aircraft which is being pooped at. So you needn’t worry about me going in for heroics. I’m much too sane. I’m only too damned sane.’

Although he was trying to reassure me, he was not pretending. But I knew, and he knew that I knew, that none of that, however much it wasn’t invented, would affect his actions. He would brood over a risk for days or weeks or months, just as he had presumably brooded over this choice of his, calculating all the odds: and then, if he thought it worth while, take it.

I had never been able to disentangle the nature of his courage. In some ways he had, before this, reminded me of Roy Calvert, Muriel’s father. Their minds were similar, precise, concentrated, clear. Their wilfulness was similar. But their courage was different in kind. Roy was a brave man, in a sense that Charles would for himself have totally disclaimed. Roy, though, had a suicidal streak. I had heard him, on a night which I should have liked to forget, tell me during the war how he had tried to throw his life away. He had done it out of despair, out of a melancholia he couldn’t shift. He had made a choice: it wasn’t one which Charles would have considered making. It wasn’t a gamble, it was an abdication. Roy had impressed on me that when he made it, he wasn’t mad. He wasn’t mad, he said, he was lucid. ‘Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hands too.’

I hadn’t to cast back for those words. Charles could never have said them. He would have distrusted Roy’s protestations of not being mad. But it was with absolute confidence that he had made his own simple statement about being ‘too damned sane’.

I believed him, totally. It was I, not he, who was tempted to read a pattern into events which he didn’t even know. If he had known them, he would have repudiated with impatience what I was tempted to see. History wasn’t like that, he would have said. Not personal history. He would have been right. The patterns weren’t real. Perhaps the weaver of the pattern, however, told one something about himself.

Then Charles asked me for an introduction. It was to a Jewish friend of mine who worked at the Weizmann Institute.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘That’s nice of you,’ said Charles.

He was beginning his Levantine journeys on the other side: easier, or at least not impossible, that way round, he said, but despite our connections he might have some explaining to do in Israel.

‘You needn’t write to—,’ the Jewish friend. ‘But I can use your name?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Bless you.’ He looked at me with what appeared like a filial grin. I was gratified that, even at this stage, he was invoking me.

Suddenly I began to think. Of all my acquaintances who might be of use to him, this one was about the most obscure.

‘Carlo,’ I said, ‘what are you up to?’

Bland gaze. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why have you just thought of him? What about David Rubin? And–?’

David Rubin, grey eminence in the United States, was also one in Israel: for years he had been an intimate of mine.

The gaze flickered. ‘As a matter of fact, I wrote to David R myself, a little while ago–’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are you up to? Anything this chap can do, Rubin can do a hundred times over. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘But what?’

Another surprise that morning. He blushed. It was a long time ago, when I had last seen him do so. Poise precarious, he broke into a weak smile.

I had it. He had been making an attempt to appease or to soothe me. He wanted to demonstrate that he had finished with his pride; he would use my influence when it was a help; any conflict had gone, he was glad to have me behind him. It was well meant, I thought, as, knowing it all, mocking each other and ourselves, we couldn’t keep our eyes from meeting.

It was well meant, but not quite careful enough in execution. Actually he had been meticulously thorough, not neglecting any contact, and taken the best advice open to either of us. This had been happening for months past, possibly before he admitted to himself that the choice was clinched.

Then, and only then, I realised that his timetable was already fixed: and that he had broken the news only a few days before he was due to leave.

43: ‘It Might Matter to Others’

AS a result of Margaret’s persuasion, I telephoned Muriel. Would she care to see me? One of us ought to make the offer, Margaret had said: and, since she herself had at the best of times been uneasy with the young woman, it had better be me. The voice at the other end of the line was polite but frigid. Yes she was by herself. She wouldn’t think of asking me to go out of my way – I must be extremely busy, but of course if I had nothing else to do – When I went to her in her drawing-room, where she had once invited me in a different mood from this, she turned to me a desensitised cheek: as desensitised as Sheila’s, I had a flash of random but chilling memory, as she said goodbye one night at a railway station and had become shut within herself.

There might be some play in the test match, Muriel observed from a distance. It was midday, the rain had stopped earlier in the morning, there was an interval of sunshine. The ground would be pretty wet, I replied, as awkward as a young man not knowing the next move. Perhaps the bowlers would get some help, she said.

I sat silent, rather than go on with spectatorial exchanges. Her hair glistened as though it had been attended to that morning, falling, though not luxuriantly, to her shoulders.

At last she said: ‘So he’s going, is he?’

‘He must have told you?’

‘Yes, he’s told me.’

‘I’m sorry–’

‘You needn’t be sorry. If it hadn’t been for you, this would never have happened.’

Her tone, light, impersonal, was intended to give pain.

‘Do you think I like it?’

‘You made it happen. You made him want to outshine you.’ Her tone was still impersonal, but unrelenting. I tried to answer without expression.

‘That’s not all of it.’ I added: ‘I tell you, it’s not even most of it.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, he’d be happy here today.’ She had been sitting with her usual stillness. She broke it just enough to spread out her hands.

I said: ‘Are you so sure that you know everything that’s moving him?’

‘I know that if you’d been different and out of his way, he’d have been content.’

She was looking at me, not so much with hatred as with cruelty. She had set out to stop any attempt to console her, or even to share her feelings: up against that, she was opposing a satisfaction of her own.

I was on the point of leaving her. I had had enough of ruthlessness: maybe this was how she had dismissed her husband and was now, in a different situation, dismissing me.

She said: ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’

‘You ought to realise that no one can stop him.’

‘You could have done–’

‘If what you say is right, perhaps me last of all.’

‘You would have stopped him’, she cried, ‘if you’d liked me more.’

That was said with as still a face as her harshest remarks: and yet, it was the nearest she could come to an appeal. So I replied, more gently than I had spoken up to now: ‘That’s nonsense, and you know it.’

‘If you’d thought I was right for him.’

‘That didn’t even enter. If I’d thought you were the most perfect woman in the world, I couldn’t have done any more.’ All of a sudden I felt that she might crack unless I came closer. I said: ‘As for you, I’m not sure whether I like you or not. I never have been. But I admire you a good deal. Charles has been lucky.’

She braced her shoulders, gave something like a smile of recognition. Possibly I had judged right. The silence had become less strained.

After a while she said, quietly, almost placidly: ‘Do you remember, the first time we talked about him here? I said that what he chose to do – it might matter to others. Well, I wasn’t far wrong, was I?’

She went on: ‘And you said something like if he’s lucky, so it might. It’s a peculiar way of being lucky, isn’t it?’

I wondered if she had used that kind of irony on Charles.

She offered me a drink, but I said no, unless she would join me. She shook her head. She said: ‘I suggest we go and sit in the garden. Just for a few minutes. You can have a look at Roy.’

For an instant, the name recalled only her own father, about whom we had not once spoken. Then I grasped that she was speaking of the child. As she led me through the downstairs sitting-room, I saw the pram, open to the sunshine, standing by the garden wall. The little boy had a pile of bricks in front of him. With great Viking shouts, he was methodically hurling them, one at a time, over the side of the pram. The curious thing was, he seemed to be registering regular intervals between each throw, something like thirty seconds, as though he were timing himself by a stopwatch or engaging in some obscure branch of time and motion study.

I burst out laughing.

‘Was is dat de joke?’ young Roy enquired, solemn face ready to grin.

‘Difficult to explain.’

‘Was is dat de joke?’ he asked his mother.

‘Uncle Lewis thinks I shall have to pick up all the bricks,’ she said, like one rational person to another.

Loud laughs. A vigorous hurl. ‘Dat is de joke.’

He looked a bright intelligent child. His head was taking on the shape of Muriel’s, with her forehead and high crown. The only features that seemed to come from his father were the dark treacle-colour eyes which Irene had brought into Martin’s family and which were dominant over the blue.

I mentioned this to Muriel.

‘Yes. It’s rather a pity, don’t you think?’ she said coolly, as though Roy ought to have been born by parthenogenesis.

‘He’s fairly good value, though, he really is,’ she said, still trying to speak coolly, but without success, as sitting on a garden seat she gazed devotedly towards the boy. Was she one of those, I thought, who after the splendours and miseries of sexual love – about which she had her own kind of knowledge, less ornamented and perhaps clearer than most of ours – turned for a different, untroubled, idyllic affection to their children? Just as old Mr March had presumably done, when he watched his son in infancy. Just as my brother Martin had done. Just as I had done myself. None of us learning anything from what we had watched, with sympathy and even with pity in others. Not even learning that this idyll was at its best, and of its nature, one-sided: whereas sexual love gave one at least a chance of full return.

Sexual love could look the more dangerous: some of those who had explored both might bring back a different report. Was Muriel, with all her deliberate composure, going the same way? After what she had seen of her own mother’s love for her and what she had been able to give back? After what she had not only seen, but sadistically said, of me and Charles?

‘He hasn’t taken anything else from his father, as far as I can see,’ said Muriel possessively, watching another chuck, accompanied by yells of laughter, as though he had found the best of all possible jokes. ‘That’s just as well,’ she added.

She turned to me, less armoured than she had been in the drawing-room.

‘Did you know’, she said, ‘that his father tried to do me a good turn not long ago?’

I shook my head.

‘You’d heard that he was always latching on to Charles and me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You expected that he was after the main chance, didn’t you? Can you guess what he was really doing?’

I said, I hadn’t the slightest idea.

‘As a matter of fact, he was trying to badger Charles into marrying me. It would be a good idea, he kept telling him. You’d have everything between you. All the old patter. I expect you’ve heard your nephew at it.’

‘Well, he seems to have been capable of being good-natured for once.’

‘He always was, if it didn’t get in his own way.’ Her face darkened. ‘I don’t know. He may have worked it out that if he interfered between me and Charles, and bullied Charles about marrying me, that he’d produce the opposite result. I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘That sounds too subtle.’

‘He was so subtle sometimes he didn’t know what he was aiming at himself. You can’t believe what a bore that was to live with. When one didn’t have an idea what he was using one for. And when he didn’t have an idea either.’

She went on: ‘He was no good. I was well rid of him. It never ought to have begun. After him, Charles was someone to fasten on to. He can be secretive, you know that. But at any rate he is a man.’

To my astonishment, she seemed to be visited by euphoria.

‘Mind you,’ she said with something like sternness, ‘I don’t want to leave you with a false impression. I haven’t given him up, you know. There’s plenty of time. Touch wood, he’ll do what he’s setting out to do. He couldn’t go back on that, that’s not the way he’s made. But when he’s done it, he won’t go an inch further. He’ll call it a day. He won’t take more chances than he need, he’ll settle down very early. It won’t be long before he’s much older than I am. Isn’t that so?’

It was not for me to deny.

To begin with, she had behaved as though she wanted to dismiss me, clear me out of her life. I might be fancying it, but here if nowhere else she appeared like a repetition of Roy Calvert. He was much kinder than she was, but no more hypocritical: I had seen him get rid of emotional lumber, when it was a case of sauve qui peut, just as finally as she had dispensed with Pat.

But no, she might desire to, but she was not doing so with me. There was a practical reason why she shouldn’t. She was holding on to Charles, with tenacity, with tenacity which exuded its own hope. She wanted me as one of her channels to him, or her card of re-entry, exactly as, during the separation between Margaret and myself before our marriage, I had preserved the acquaintance of Austin Davidson.

That was a practical reason for talking to me and in fact confiding, as she had just done. It was useful that she should have me within calling distance. Yet, though she might not admit it, there was another reason, perhaps a stronger one, why, holding on to Charles, she also needed to hold on to me. Anyone as unpadded as she was, and as contemptuous of nonsense about human relations, thought they were easy to cut off sharp – by a stroke of the will, clean, sharp and clinical.

One could imagine her, much older, thinking that all such relations had been a self-deceit: sexual relations, they turned mechanical and came to an end: friendships in the long run were a habit and no more: love for one’s children, of that she had had warnings, and they had come true. With an obscure pleasure, she might alone, old, reflecting by herself, in her head reduce them all to nothing. The trouble was, that reduction was entirely abstract, no one lived like that. Human relations might be no more than she had come to think: but with them, however old she was, she would have to make do.

There were even some, very much more tenuous than the primary ones, which she would find surprisingly hard to cut. One could over-complicate them, I had often been guilty of that, but still there were some which, not at all imperative, nowhere near the centre of one’s life, continued to dog one. To an extent, that was true of her relation with me. It bore a family relation to many others. It was, in a sense, the relation of rivals, that is of two who had a claim on the same thing. On a job, if you like: or, what was more common, on a person.

Of all the relations that one saw or entered, these could be the most mirage-like, shimmering, hardest to define even in one’s own mind. Yet two men struggling for the same post could, for a fluctuating instant, feel closer than any friends. The same was occasionally true between rivals for a woman: and much more often, so far as I had seen, between an old intimacy and a new. Thus Muriel, wanting Charles alone, without any residual link to me, couldn’t help attaching some resonance of that link on to herself. I had watched that happen several times: with Mr March and his son’s wife: with Sammikins, when his sister married Roger Quaife: even with Margaret and Martin.

Muriel, more emotionally streamlined than most of us, would have had no patience with any of these sideshows. Secondary feelings were nothing but tiresome, and should be thrown away. She was not, however, as independent as she believed, and whether she accepted it or not, she was behaving like a softer character, turning to me with something like trust, assuming, as we sat there beside the pram, that this was not the last time she would confide in me.

44: It Might Have Seemed an End

‘Be kind to him,’ Margaret told me, not long before Charles was leaving. ‘He’s been very kind to me.’

She was smiling, but her eyes were bright. She repeated, that I was to be as kind over the parting as he had been to her. In fact, it was Charles who was in control, not I. He had himself, not at all by accident, set the tone of that whole day. He had arranged it so that, when he left, we were not all to be together. It was an afternoon when Margaret was visiting Diana’s baby, and so Charles had said goodbye to her before lunch, and then gone off to visit Muriel.

He did not return until after the time for Margaret’s departure: it was about half past two and I was sitting alone in the drawing-room.

‘Hallo,’ said Charles, face businesslike, telling nothing of the parting just completed. ‘I’d better hump my stuff along.’

Footsteps, as quick as when he was on holiday from school, up and down the passage. Thump of a rucksack on the drawing-room carpet. His ‘stuff’ was simple enough, just that and a hand case for typewriter and papers.

‘Got everything?’ I said, unable to repress the fatuous pre-journey questions.

Charles, sitting down on the sofa, grinned. ‘I shall soon find out if I haven’t.’ He was experienced in travel, and took it as it came.

He smiled at me. If there had been a clock in the room, I should have begun hearing it ticking time away: but Charles would not let us sit in silence or even endure a hush. One or two practical points, he said, sounding brisk, as though they had all been settled days before. Communications: in case of emergencies at home, journalist acquaintances would trace him. Whatever newspapers couldn’t do, they could find you. Otherwise he would write when he reached a town. Addresses – not to be relied on, but I had them, hadn’t I? All this which we each knew had been established, as though we were obsessively tearing open our own envelope to make sure it didn’t contain the wrong letter, was repeated with the blitheness of a new discovery. The same with money. He wouldn’t need more, he didn’t wish to take another pound from me; but it was sensible to have an arrangement in reserve. This again Charles spun out, as though there were nothing safer than the sedative of facts.

At last his powers of repetition began to fail. Then he gazed round the drawing-room, which he had known all his life, like one playing a memorising game.

‘You’ve never been on your own abroad, have you?’ he asked. ‘Not for a long time.’ Then I had to correct myself. ‘No, never, in the way you have.’

‘It’s curious, the things you hanker after. Nothing dramatic. Nothing like a handsome dinner at the Connaught. No, a sandwich in front of the old television set is nearer the mark.’

With deliberate casualness, he had let his eyes stray to his wristwatch.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘it’s after three o’clock.’

Not much longer to play out. Soon he was able to say: ‘Well, I really think it’s about time we moved.’

In front of the house, waiting for a taxi, Charles beside me, I glanced down towards Marble Arch, the way from which he had walked in the rain, oblivious and triumphant, after his first night with Muriel. He looked in the same direction, but it meant nothing to him: he had not seen himself.

Traffic was sparse and travelling fast: no taxis were passing either way, in the mid-afternoon lull. I felt the same chagrin as when I waited there with Nina. I had offered to order a car to drive him to the airport, but he had said, smiling: ‘No, that’s not quite my style.’ Nowadays, he went on, chaps like him contented themselves by going to the terminal and taking the tumbril (airline bus) ‘like everyone else’.

He was more schooled in travel waiting than I was. Impatient, though there was plenty of time, I searched for taxi lights up and down the road. It was a Wimbledon week, cloud layer very low, weather grey, chilly and in some way protective, such as we had become used to in those Julys. Roses loomed from the bushes in the park opposite; there had been roses standing out in Muriel’s garden a few days before, roses all over the London gardens.

At last a taxi, turning left from the Park Lane drive, on the other side of the road. Charles rushed across waving long arms. Blink of light. As we settled inside, he said: ‘Here we go.’

Passing through the Albion Gate, we could see, without noticing, the grass hillocks and hollows which we knew by heart; that was the way we walked in his holiday two years before, and earlier still, when he was a small child. None of it impinged, it was taken for granted now. Instead, he was recommending a film to which he insisted that I should go.

‘Parting injunction,’ he said, explaining precisely why it was necessary for me, why his friends admired it, and which aspects he required my views about. The long descent down Exhibition Road: still talk of films. Last lap, stop and go, brakes and lights, among the Cromwell Road snarl. For the first time Charles was quiet, sitting forward, as though willing the taxi on.

Then he thought of another request, for a book which he wanted sent after him.

In the terminal, he disappeared, rucksack lurching and bobbing, among the crowd, which was jostling with the random purposefulness of a Brownian movement, faces of as many different anthropological shapes and colours as on the Day of Judgment or on an American campus at midday. It was some time before he returned. All in order. He had made contact with someone else who was flying on the Beirut plane.

On the fringe of the crowd, noise level high, we looked at each other.

‘Well,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said.

The word of all partings. Davidson’s bedside. The old railway station in the town, on my way to London. Liverpool Street. Now the airports. Always, if you were the one staying behind, you were wishing, even though you were saying goodbye to someone you loved, that it was over.

‘Don’t stay,’ said Charles. ‘It’s tiresome waiting.’

‘Well, perhaps–’

We embraced. As Charles went quickly into the crowd, he said: ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

Not quite in his style, as he had said about a private car, but I didn’t think of that, as I watched his head above the others, and then turned away, out into the cool air.

It might have seemed an end. But not to me, and not, perhaps, to him. He might know already, what had taken me so much longer to learn, that we made ends and shapes and patterns in our minds but that we didn’t live our lives like that. We couldn’t do so, because the force inherent in our lives was stronger and more untidy than anything we could tell ourselves about it. Just as a young woman like Muriel believed she could discard affections which she thought she had outlived, so I, growing old, believed that my life had constricted, and that, with not much left of what I had once been hungry for, I should find them – those last demands – weakening their hold on me. We were wrong, and wrong in the same fashion. Muriel was bound to discover that her life was going to surprise her: and mine, even now (no, there was no ‘even now’ about it, time and age didn’t matter), hadn’t finished with me.

Since the nights in the hospital room, when I saw one moment transformed into another, so that one’s feelings were astonishing, and often self-ridiculing, as they created themselves afresh, I hadn’t been certain when I could say – I shall not feel like that again.

Watching my son, I had revived much that I had thought long dead. And even when one came to the last hard core of feeling – interests worn out, both kinds of love (so far as one could believe it) now slackened – when one came to confront oneself alone, then still there was a flux of energy, of transformation, yes tantalisingly an inadmissible hope, getting in the way. I had thought, in some of the crises of my life, that if all went wrong, I should be finally, and once for all, alone. Now I knew that that was one of the shapes and sounds with which we deceived ourselves, giving our life a statuesqueness, perhaps a certain kind of dignity, that it couldn’t in fact possess. In the hospital room I had been as nearly alone as I could get. I had imagined, and spoken of, what it would be like, but what I had imagined was nothing like the here and now, the continuous creation, the thrust of looking for the next moment which belonged to oneself and spread beyond the limits of oneself. When one is as alone as one can get, there’s still no end.

The only end, maybe, was in the obituary notices: that might be an end for those who read them, but not for oneself, who didn’t know.

Whether one liked it or not, one was propelled by a process of renewal, or hope, or will, that wasn’t in the strictest sense one’s own. That was as true, so far as I could judge first-hand, for the old as well as the young. It was as true of me as it was for Charles. Whether it was true of extreme old age I couldn’t tell: but my guess was, that this particular repository of self, this ‘I’ which felt and spoke for each of us, lived in a dimension of its own.

Whether this was a consolatory thought, I couldn’t answer to myself. It was, I thought, more humbling than otherwise. It took the edge off some kinds of suffering. It took the edge also off some kinds of conceit. But yet one had to think it – and this perhaps was a consolation or even a fighting shout – because one was alive.

Through the cloud-shielded afternoon, I began to walk back the way which we had come. It was a familiar way home, the last mile in each air journey, as it had been for Margaret and me, returning from holiday, the week before her father’s attempt to kill himself. Bridge over the Serpentine, trees dense beyond: I was walking, not thinking to myself, not acting like a camera, in something like the image-drifting stupor which came before one went to sleep. I wasn’t thinking of other homecomings to that house: or to any others (some forgotten, one didn’t remember in biographical terms) to which, once known as home, I had returned.

From the park I could see our windows, no lights inside, no sun to burnish them. There was no one at home. I didn’t feel any of the anxiety that had afflicted Margaret and me at other homecomings: and which I had been possessed by, without understanding, as a child running home along the road from the parish church. For that evening, all was peace.

It was certain that, in days soon to come, I should go home, those feelings flooding back, as alive as ever in the past, as I thought of cables or telephone calls. As alive as ever in the past. That was the price of the ‘I’ which would not die.

But I had lived with that so long. I had lived with much else too, and now I could recognise it. This wasn’t an end: though, if I had thought so, looking at the house, I should have needed to propitiate fate, remembering so many others’ luck, Francis Getliffe’s and the rest, and the comparison with mine. I had lived with much else that I would have had, and begged to have again. That night would be a happy one. This wasn’t an end.

(Who would dare to look in the mirror of his future?)

There would be other nights when I should go to sleep, looking forward to tomorrow.