The Sleep of Reason

1: Visit to a Grandfather

THAT afternoon I had been walking with my son in what for me were familiar streets, streets of the town where I was born. I had taken him there only once before, when he was an infant. Now he was nearly fifteen, and we spoke the same language. I was taunting him because he had seen the “pretty England” and nothing of the rest; until that afternoon he had never seen a provincial town like this. He grinned. Whose fault was that? he said.

And yet the town was not so unpretty: shops glittered and shone, well-dressed women walked the pavements, fresh-skinned girls in their spring frocks: cars jarred and halted, bumper to stern, hoods dazzling in a burst of sunshine. Once I had heard a fellow citizen called Sawbridge saying, with equal disapproval of the United States and his native town, that you could put the place down in the middle of America and no one would know the difference. It was nearly accurate, not quite. You could still, if you knew your way about, trace some of the streets of the old market town: narrow harsh streets with homely names, like Pocklington’s Walk, along which I had gone to work forty years before, craving not to be unknown, craving to get out of here. That I did not explain to my son Charles, who was discreetly puzzled as to why we were wandering through a quarter which, to any unbeglamoured eye, was sombre and quite unusually lacking in romance.

However, when we returned to one of the bright shopping streets, and someone greeted me by name, he did ask, after we had passed on: “What does that feel like?”

Probably it had not been an acquaintance from the past: this was 1963, and I had left the town for good in the late twenties: probably it was what Charles was used to, a result of photographs or the mass media. But he was perceptive, he guessed that being picked out in this place might pluck a nerve. Nevertheless, he was surprised by my reply.

“To tell you the honest truth,” I said, “it makes me want to hide.”

He glanced at me sidelong with dark searching eyes. He knew that, as a rule, I was not self-conscious and was used to the public life. He did not understand it. But if he didn’t understand it, neither did I. I couldn’t have explained what I had just said. It seemed perverse and out of character. Yet it was quite true.

Charles thought of pressing me, then decided against. The clock on the town hall said a quarter to four; it was time for us to make our way to my father’s house, or to be more exact, my father’s room. Charles had seen his grandfather only once, on his one other visit to the town, when he was three years old. To anyone outside, that must have sounded as though we had been heartless, not only without instinctive ties but without responsibility. After all, I had been lucky, my wife and family lived a privileged life. How could I bear neglecting the old man? In fact, my father had his own views. He seemed, and was, the most affable and gentle of human beings. But he just wanted to be left alone, to get on with his own mysterious concerns, whatever they were and if they existed. My brother Martin had tried to persuade him to live with them in Cambridge: I had wanted to have him in London. Not a bit of it. With simple passive resistance, he refused to move. He would not even take money. I had made more than enough, but he would not accept a penny, except for a bottle of port at Christmas. With his old age pension and the rent from his lodger, he had, he said, quite enough for his needs.

He was, I thought, the most self-sufficient man I had come across. He was amiably and genuinely uninterested in his grandchildren. Even that afternoon, I had had to force him to let Charles and me come to tea. I was having to pay visits to the town every three months or so, on a piece of minor duty. This particular visit coincided with Charles being at home on holiday. So I had brought him up for the day, and had insisted that my father invite us. After all, he was in his late eighties: I had my share of piety (from which my father seemed singularly free), and it might be Charles’ last chance to talk to him.

We took the bus out to the suburbs, on what in my childhood would have been the old tram route: red brick, the jail, the gasworks, less change here than in the middle of the town. And when we got off and walked into the back streets, there was less change still: the doctor’s house, the cluster of shops, the chapel, the terraced houses up the rise. Not that I was stirred by memory: I had seen it too recently for that. Instead, I looked up at the clouds, low on the south-west wind, breathed in the soft spring air, and said: “I like this Atlantic weather.”

“Meteorological fiend,” said my son, with a friendly gibing smile. He had developed the theory that I, the child of cities, could not resist an obsessive interest in climatic phenomena: and that this was not shared by all who heard the results, including himself. It was the kind of sarcastic banter that came easily to him. I answered in kind, pointing out that at least one person had shared my meteorological enthusiasm, and that was one of the few men whom I actively detested.

He was smiling, as we went past the two-storey terrace, front doors opening on to the pavement. It was no use preparing him for what he was going to meet: he would certainly find my father odd, possibly a strain, but that he would have to take. At the end of the row we came to a pair of larger houses, joined together. I pointed to the nearer one, and told him that was where I was born. It was dilapidated, but, to judge from the television aerials on the roof, inhabited by a couple of families. On the strip of earth inside the railings — which my mother used to call the front garden — the laburnum tree had become a blackened stump.

With a concentrated gaze Charles studied the front room window, the peeling paint, the carved inscription between the houses, Albert Villas 1860, and said nothing at all. Then he asked: “Could we go in, do you think?”

“I don’t think so, do you?”

“Perhaps they wouldn’t like it.”

The next house along the road had been built in the same period, but was larger and stood on its own. In my childhood it had belonged to my Aunt Milly’s husband: he had been a building contractor in a small way, and they were less poor than we were, and had often (offending my mother’s pride) been obliged to support us. When my mother died, by this time nearly forty years before, my father had gone to live with Aunt Milly, who was his sister. There he had stayed. Aunt Milly’s husband died, then she herself. They were childless, and, though she had willed their savings to various temperance societies, the house had come to my father. He had promptly let it off, keeping one room for himself: and there he had lived for the last twenty years.

I led the way to that single room — down an entry, through a gate, into a yard paved with flagstones. The architecture of Aunt Milly’s house, like that of my mother’s, was bizarre, as though space didn’t matter and the more levels the better, so that there was a one-storey range, with a twenty-foot-high chimney, floors at yard-level: while five steps up was a French window, opening straight into my father’s room, which led into the main body of the house. Behind the French window one could see a glow on the ceiling, fluctuating, not very bright although the afternoon was dark, which must come from my father’s fire.

“There he is, I expect,” I said to Charles.

We went up the steps, and I rapped on the window. (There was a much quicker and more orthodox method of entry through the front door, but my father did not like being a trouble to his lodger.) Shuffle of steps. Rattle of handles. The two sides of the window opened, and in between them, facing us, my father stood.

“Well, I declare,” he said.

His first action was to peer up at Charles, making tunnels with his fingers over his spectacles as though sighting some far distant object.

“I shall want a telescope to look at him,” my father said.

I was six feet, and Charles, at fifteen, was only an inch or two shorter. My father was a little man. In my childhood he had claimed to five feet four: but now, with extreme old age, he had shrunk an inch or more. Standing there, old wide trousers flopping on his boots, his head seemed to come no higher than our chests.

“I want a telescope, that’s what I do.” He went on clowning. He had always clowned, as far back as I could remember; he had been cheerful in his clowning then, just as he was now.

After we had sat down in the crowded little room — Charles on a chair on one side of the fireplace, my father on the other, me on the sofa where he slept at night — he was still talking about telescopes, but in a different vein.

“You know, Lewis, I’ve always thought I should like one.”

I asked him why: I knew that tone by heart.

“Well, you never know what you might find out.”

He had daydreamed all his life. Just for an instant he was the supreme astronomer, discovering — at an advanced age and to his own mild surprise — new secrets of the universe. Or perhaps overturning established conceptions, an activity for which he had always had a secret fancy. All through my boyhood he had read travel books, often the same book over and over again: then he was the fearless single-handed explorer, going where no white man had ever trodden — he had a special feeling that the Amazonian jungle was the place for him. I had discovered, on my last visit, that he still borrowed travel books from the library at the corner of the road. As he sat in his chair, I could see a dozen or so books on the shelf behind him: they seemed the only books in the room, the only ones he possessed or had borrowed. How many of those were about travel? Or what other sorts of daydreams did he have?

“You never know what you might find out,” he chortled. “But I expect I should find out something wrong!”

He went on chortling with satisfaction. He hadn’t spoken out of self-pity, or at least, if he had, it was a singular kind of self-pity, which consisted of referring to himself as though he were the most ludicrous of jokes.

He was, as usual, happy. Sitting beneath the mantelpiece, on which stood a marble clock flanked by photographs, some of the choral society of which he had been secretary so long, together with one of my mother, he did not look his age. His hair was white, but he had lost none of it: his great drooping moustache still, amid the white, kept a touch of ginger: the lenses of his spectacles, which he could not manage to put on straight, had not been changed since middle age. His pop eyes remained innocently amused. By some genetic fluke, he had missed the deep blue irises which were dominant in the family: his father had had them and all the rest of us: Charles’, as he watched my father vigilantly across the fireplace, in that light looked not indigo but black. My father’s had not faded, but were very light, which made him appear more innocent. Sitting down he also appeared bigger than he was, since his legs were short and his head out of proportion large.

A kettle was boiling on the hob between them. My father had so far paid no attention to Charles, except once or twice to address him, with impersonal cheerfulness, by my Christian name or my brother Martin’s. Charles, on the other hand, was paying complete attention to him. Charles had met a lot of people, some formidable, many what the world called successful: but his grandfather was different from any. This was a test, not only of instinctual ties, but also of insight. At the same time Charles, I had no doubt, was listening to my father’s soft Midland accent, of which Charles could hear the vestigial overtones in me.

“Well, young man,” said my father, abandoning nomenclature as he spoke to Charles, “I expect you’re ready for your tea, aren’t you? I know I am.”

Politely Charles admitted that he was.

“I’m always ready for my tea,” said my father. “If I can’t do anything else, then I can always get rid of my tea.”

He hooted with obscure gratification, and sang a few bars of a song I didn’t know, in a voice still disconcertingly strong. Efficiently, neat-fingeredly, like a man used to looking after himself he made the tea.

“One, two, three spoonfuls — and one for the pot,” he chanted. He shuffled round the room, and produced the tea things. He produced also a large plate of cakes, jam tarts, custard tarts, éclairs, marzipan. “I always say,” my father remarked, “there’s nothing like something sweet to your tea.”

I did not agree, but Charles did. He might be perceptive beyond his years, but he had a healthy fifteen-year-old appetite: and so, while I drank a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette, the grandfather and grandson, with over seventy years between them, sat on opposite sides of the fireplace — in silence, except for appreciative lip noises under the moustache — eating cakes. Not just one cake each, but two, three, four, half-a-dozen.

When they had finished the plateful, my father sighed with content and turned mild eyes on me.

“You made a mistake there, Lewis. They went down all right, confound me if they didn’t.”

Then he seemed to feel that some concession was called for.

“Still,” he said, “you’ve got on well, I must say that.”

He had, I was sure, only the haziest notion of my life. He may have realised that I had played some part in affairs: he ought to have known that I was no longer poor, for I had told him so. Certainly he had never read a word I had written. Charles, still vigilant, was wearing a surreptitious smile. Unlike my father, Charles knew a good deal about what had happened to me, the rough as well as the smooth. He knew that, since I left the official life, some attacks had followed me, one or two predictable, and one based upon a queer invention. Charles did not, as some sons would, imagine that I was invulnerable: on the contrary, he believed that this last situation he would have handled better himself.

“I often wish,” my father continued, “that your mother had lived to see how you’ve got on.”

Yes, I did too. Yes, I thought, she would have revelled in a lot of it — the title, the money, the well-known name. Yet, like Charles — though without the sophistication — she would have known it all; once again, the rough as well as the smooth. Anyone who raised a voice against me, she, that fierce and passionate woman, would have wanted to claw, not as a figure of speech but in stark flesh, with her own nails.

“That’s how I like to think of her, you know,” my father said, pointing to the mantelpiece. “Not as she was at the end.”

I got up, took the photograph down, and showed it to Charles. It was a hand-tinted photograph, taken somewhere round 1912, when they were a little better off than ever after, and when I was seven years old. She was wearing a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves: her black hair and high colouring stood out, so did her aquiline beak of a nose. She looked both handsome, which she could be, and proud, which she always was, sometimes satanically so. As I remarked to Charles, it wasn’t a bad picture.

What my father had said might have sounded sentimental, like a gentle old man lamenting the past and the only woman, the only happiness, he had ever known. On the contrary. My father was as little sentimental as a man could reasonably be. The truth was different. What he had said, was a plain statement. That was how, when he thought of her at all — he lived in the present and their marriage was a long time ago — he preferred to think of her. But it had been an ill-tuned marriage: for her, much worse than that. He had been the “wrong man”, she used to confide in me, and in my childhood I took this to mean that he was ineffectual, too amiable for the world’s struggle, unable to give her the grandeur that somehow she thought should be hers by right. Later I thought, remembering what I had submerged, that there was more to it. I could recall bitter words over a maid (yes, on something like £250 a year, before the First World War, she kept a maid): I guessed, though I should never know for certain, that under his mild and beaming aspect there was a disconcerting ardour, which came as a surprise, though a pleasant one, to himself. As their marriage got worse, he had, when I was quite young, found his own consolations. Since she died, it had puzzled me that he had not married again. Yet again I guessed that in a cheerful covert fashion he had found what he wanted: and that, on a good many nights, he had returned to this little room raising his robust baritone with a satisfaction, as though singing meaninglessly to himself, which as a child I did not begin to understand.

Charles was still looking at the photograph. My father made an attempt to address him by name, gave it up, but nevertheless spoke to him:

“She always used to tell me ‘Bertie, don’t be such a donkey! Don’t be such a donkey!’ Milly used to do the same. They always used to say I was a donkey!”

The reminiscence seemed to fill him with extreme pleasure. Charles looked up, and felt called upon to smile. But he gave me a side glance, as though for once he was somewhat at a loss.

The clock on the mantelpiece, in measured strokes, struck five.

“Solemn-toned clock,” said my father with approval. “Solemn-toned clock.” That was a ritual phrase which I must have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. When she was hopeful, and her hopes though precarious were inextinguishable, it used to make my mother smile: but in a crisis it made her break out in jangled nerves, in disappointment at all the hopes frustrated. That evening, however, the sound of the clock set my father going: now he was really on his own; so far as he had any self-esteem, here it was. For the clock had been presented to him after a period of service as secretary to a male voice choir: and he had been secretary to similar choirs ever since, for nearly sixty years in all. This had been the theme of his existence, outside himself, and he proposed to talk about it. Which, with amiable, pattering persistence, he duly did. It was all still going on. Not so flourishing as in the past. What with television — he had refused to let us buy him a set, though there was a sound radio in a corner of the room — people weren’t so willing to give up the time as in the old days. Still, some were keen. There had been changes. Male voice choirs weren’t so popular, so he had brought in women. (That I had known; it had been the one political exertion of my father’s life; it took me back for an instant to my speculations of a few moments before.) He had managed to keep a group of twenty or so together. Nowadays they met for rehearsal each Sunday after service at St Mary’s, one of the churches in the town.

It was a quiet little obsession, but it gave him all the enjoyment of an obsession. I didn’t want to cut him short, but at last he flagged slightly. I could ask a question. Wasn’t St Mary’s a longish journey for him? It must be all of three miles.

“Oh,” he said, “I get a bus that takes me near enough.”

“But coming back late at night?”

“Well, one of our members, Mr Rattenbury” — (I wondered if Charles noticed that ‘Mr’ which my father had applied to each of his male acquaintances all his life) — “he usually gives me a lift.”

“But if you don’t get a lift?”

“Then I just have to toddle home on my own two pins.”

He rose from his chair, and exemplified — without complaint, in fact with hilarity — very short steps on very short legs.

“Isn’t that a bit much?” At his age, that was an understatement, but I couldn’t say any more. Even at this, his face was clouded, and I wasn’t going to spoil his pleasure.

“It’s a bit slippy in winter, you know. But I get here. I shouldn’t be here now if I didn’t, should I?”

That struck him as the most clinching of retorts. He was delighted with it. It set him off chanting loudly: Anyway — the summer — is — coming — anyway — the — spring — is — here.

Then he seemed to feel that he had certain responsibilities for Charles which he had not discharged. He had given him cakes. Was that enough? My father looked puzzled: then suddenly his face shone with preternatural worldliness.

“Young man,” he said, “I want to give you a piece of advice.”

Charles leaned gravely towards him.

“I expect,” the old man said, “your father gives you some money now and then, doesn’t he?”

Charles misunderstood, and was a shade embarrassed. “I’m quite all right for money, thank you very much, sir.”

“Of course you are! Of course you are! I’m going to give you a piece of advice that I gave your father a long time ago.” Now I myself remembered: he had the memory for detail long past that I had seen before in the very old. “I always tell people,” he said, as though he were daydreaming again, this time of himself as the successful financier, deferred to by less experienced men, “I always tell people that you never ought to go about without a few pound notes sewn in a place where you’re never going to lose it. I told your father a long time ago, and I hope he listened to me, that he ought to have five of his pound notes sewn into the seat of his trousers. Mind you, five pounds doesn’t go as far now as it did then. If I were you, I should get someone to sew fifteen or twenty pounds into the seat of your trousers. I expect you can lay your hands on twenty pound notes, can’t you? Well, you do what I tell you. You never know when they’ll come in useful. You just think of me when you find they’ve got you out of a tight corner.”

Charles, his face controlled, promised that he would.

My father exuded content. Charles and I stretched our legs, getting ready to go. When we were putting on our coats, opening the French window so that the evening air struck cold into the stuffy, odorous little room, I told my father that I would drop in during my next visit to the town.

“Oh, don’t put yourself out for me, Lewis,” he said, as though he quite liked my company but even more preferred not to be disturbed. With his beaming innocent smile he waved us out.

Charles and I didn’t speak until we had emerged from the entry back into the road. There was a light, I noticed, two houses along, in what had been our old “front room”.

It had been raining, the sky was bright again. Charles gave me a curious smile.

“Life goes on,” he said.

I took him the longer way round to the bus stop, past the branch library, past the red-brick church (1900-ish, pitchpine and stained-glass windows, scene both of splendours and miseries for my mother), down the hill to the main road. From the grass in the garden patches there came a fresh, anxiety-lifting, rainwashed smell. We were each of us silent, not uncomfortably so, but still, touched by the afternoon.

After a time Charles said: “It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”

“You mean, he wasn’t?”

“No, I didn’t mean that, quite.”

I asked him another question, but he shook his head. He was preoccupied, just as I had been in the middle of the town, and this time it was he who did not want to be pressed.

On the top of the bus, on the way to the railway station, he made one reference to my father’s practical advice, smiled, and that was all. We chatted on the station, waiting for his train: he was going home alone, since I had an appointment in the town next day. As we were chatting, quite casually, the station’s red brick glaring at us, the sulphurous smoke swirling past, just for once that day, memory, direct memory, gave me its jab. I was standing in that station, years before, going to London, nerves tingling, full of hope.

The train was coming in. Charles’ education had been different from mine, but he was no more inhibited than I was, and we hugged each other in the Russian fashion as we said goodbye.

2: A Young Woman in Love

AFTER leaving my son, I took a taxi to the Vice-Chancellor’s Residence. In my youth, there wouldn’t have been such a place or such a person: but in the ’fifties the old College of Art and Technology, where I had once attended George Passant’s lectures, had been transmogrified into one of the newest crop of universities. In fact, it was for that reason that I made my periodical visits to the town. The new university had adopted — out of an obstinacy that derived entirely from its Head — something like a Scottish constitution, with a small executive Court, consisting of academics, local dignitaries, and a representative elected by the students: since I could, by a certain amount of stately chicanery, be regarded as an old member, they had elected me. I was happy to go there. For years I had been free of official business: this was no tax at all, it did not distract me from my work: occasionally, as in those for the next day, the termly agenda contained a point of interest. But I was happy really because I had reached a stage when the springs of my life were making their own resonances clear, which I could hear, sometimes insistently, not only with my family but with people I had known.

In the April evening, the taxi chugged along in the stream of outbound traffic, past the hedges and gardens of the prosperous suburb, the gravel drives, the comfortable bourgeois houses, the lighted windows. These were houses I had walked by as a boy: but to this day I had not often been inside. I knew much poorer houses, like my father’s, where I had been an hour before: and, because of the way things had gone, I had spent some time in recent years in grander ones. But somehow that specific sector had eluded me, and with it a slice of this comfortable, affluent town.

Was that why, as I stood outside the Residence and saw the bright drawing-room, blinds not drawn, standard light by the window, I felt a pang, as though I were an outsider? It seemed so for an instant: and yet, in cold blood, I should have known it was not true. I was still capable of walking down any street, seeing a lighted window, and feeling that same pang, which was made up of curiosity, envy and desire: in that sense, one doesn’t age: one can still envy a hearth glow, even if one is returning to a happy home: it isn’t a social chance, but something a good deal deeper, that can at untameable moments, make one feel for ever youthful, and, as far as that goes, for ever in the street outside.

I went in, and became, as though a switch had been turned, at home. Vicky Shaw greeted me. Yes, my bag had been taken upstairs. Her father was, as usual, working late. I was to come and have a drink.

Sitting in an armchair in the drawing-room (which was not at all magical, soft-cushioned but with tepid pictures on the walls), I looked at her. Since her mother died, Vicky had been acting as hostess for her father, although she had just qualified as a doctor and had a job at the infirmary. She was just twenty-four, not handsome, her face a shade too equine to be pretty, and yet comely: long, slight: fair hair swept back and knotted. I was very fond of her. She did not make me feel — as on those visits, despite the time-switch on the drive outside, I sometimes did — that I was an ageing man with a public face. And also she had the special radiance, and the special vulnerability, of a young woman for the first time openly in love.

I expected to hear something of that. But she was direct and often astringent; there was business to get through first. She was a devoted daughter, but she thought that her father, as a Vice-Chancellor, was a bit of an ass. His enemies were trying to ease him out — that she knew as well as I did. He was giving them opportunities. Tomorrow’s case would be used against him, unless I could work on him. She didn’t have to tell me about it: I had heard from the appellants themselves. A couple of young men had been found bedding a girl each in a room in one of the hostels. The disciplinary committee, which meant in effect Arnold Shaw himself, had next day sent all four down for good. They had appealed to the Court.

“He may get away with it there,” Vicky said, “but that won’t be the end of it.”

Once again, both of us knew. He put people off. They said that he was a shellback, with no sympathy for the young.

“Of course,” she said, “he was wrong anyway. He ought to have told them to go and do it somewhere else. But he couldn’t say that, you know.”

I found it impossible to keep back a vestigial grin. Arnold Shaw could bring himself to say that about as easily as John Calvin in one of his less libertarian moods.

“Why in God’s name, though,” she said, “didn’t he play it cool?”

Did she have to ask me? I replied.

Reluctantly she smiled. She knew, better than anyone, that he was incorruptible: rigid: what he believed, he believed. If everyone else in the country were converted to sexual freedom, he would stay outside the swim: and be certain that he was right.

She put more whisky into my tumbler. She said: “And yet, you know, he was a very good father to me. Even when I was little. He was always very kind.”

“I shouldn’t have thought you were difficult to bring up,” I told her.

She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t all that disciplined.” She broke off: “Anyway, do your best with him tonight.”

I said she mustn’t bank on anything I could do. With a frown, she replied: “He’s as obstinate as a pig.”

There was nothing else useful to say. So, businesslike, she cut off short, and told me who was coming to dinner. It was a small party. The Hargraves, the Gearys — yes, I had met Hargrave on the Court, I knew the Gearys well — and Leonard Getliffe. As she mentioned the last name, I glanced at her. She had the delicate skin common among her own kind of blonde, and she had flushed down to the neckline.

Leonard Getliffe was the eldest son of my friend Francis, whom I had met almost as soon as I first went to London from this town: ever since, our lives had interweaved. But their connection with the university was no credit to me, only to Arnold Shaw. Since Francis gave up being an influence in Whitehall, at the time of Quaife’s failure and mine, his scientific work had gone better than in his youth, his reputation had grown. And, though probably not as a consequence, he had recently been made a life peer. So Arnold Shaw, whose academic standards were as rigorous as his moral ones (and who, incidentally, was by no means averse to titles), had schemed for him to be the second Chancellor of the University: and for once Arnold had brought something off. He had brought something else off too, more valuable to the place: for he had persuaded Leonard, before he was thirty, to take a professorship. Leonard was, in the jargon of the day, a real flier. He was more gifted than his father: he was, so David Rubin and the others said, one of the best theoretical physicists going. All he needed was a bit of luck, they said, talking of luck exactly as people did in more precarious fields: then they would be tipping him for a Nobel prize. He might be more gifted than his father, but he was just as high-principled. He could do his theoretical work anywhere; why not try to help a new university? So, when Arnold Shaw invited him, he had without fuss left Trinity and come.

Vicky was blushing. She met my glance, and her eyes were blue, candid and distressed. It might have seemed that she was pining for him. In fact the opposite was true. He was eaten up with love for her. It had happened a year before, almost as soon as they met, perhaps on the first day. He was begging her to marry him. Her father passionately wanted the marriage: the Getliffes would have welcomed it. All their children were married by now, except Leonard, their eldest and their particular star. The only person who didn’t want the marriage was Vicky herself. She couldn’t respond. She was a kind girl, but she couldn’t see any way to be kind. Sometimes, when she saw him, she felt — there was no repressing it — plain irritated. Often she felt guilty. People told her this was someone of a quality she would never meet again: they told her she was interfering with his work. She knew it. For a while it had been flattering, but that wore off. Once, when I had been staying in the Residence, she had broken out: “It’s not fair! I look at myself in the glass. What have I got to produce this sort of passion? No, it’s ridiculous.”

She had little conceit. She could have done with more, I thought. She wanted to shrug the responsibility off, and couldn’t. She was honest, and in some ways prosaic. But she didn’t seem prosaic when she talked about the man she loved.

She had fallen in love herself — but after she had met Leonard Getliffe. The man she loved could scarcely have been more different from Leonard. I knew him, I knew him better than she did, or at least in a different fashion, for he was my nephew, Martin’s son.

She wanted to tell me. Yes, she had seen Pat last week. In London. They had gone to — she brought out the name of a Soho restaurant as though it were embossed, just as she brought out the name of Pat. We had all done it, I thought: the facts, the names of love are special facts, special names: it made the air bright, even to hear. But it also made the air uneasy.

After all, I was looking at him with an uncle’s eyes, not with those of an adoring young woman. I thought he was an engaging youth, but I had been astonished when she became enraptured. To begin with, he was only twenty, four years younger than she was. True, he was precocious, and she probably the reverse. Yet I had seen my brother, a steady-natured man, but also a possessive father, trying to cope with that precocity. It had taught my brother what fatherhood could mean. Pat’s name wasn’t even Pat. He had been christened after me, but had renamed himself when he was an adolescent. He had rebelled against his first school, and been lucky to survive a second. Martin had managed to get him a place at our Cambridge college: he had given up after a year and gone to London to paint. How he managed to get support out of Martin or anyone else, I didn’t know: but I thought there weren’t many means that he would consider inappropriate. Had he any talent? Here for once Vicky, in the midst of her delight, became half-lucid. “I do hope,” she said, “that he’s as good as he wants to be. Sometimes I worry because he might get bored with it.”

Then she asked me favours: could they come and see us at our London flat? Could I bring him down to the university some time? She was innocent and shameless: yet anyone would have said that she was one of the stablest of young women, and it would have been true. That was why it was a liberation to abandon herself like this. If he arrived that moment, I was thinking, she would be proud to throw her arms round his neck.

I asked for another drink. With a shake of her head, coming back to other people’s earth, she poured me a small one.

“Go slow on that,” she said, tapping the glass, talking to me like a brisk, affectionate and sensible daughter. “You’ll get plenty tonight. Remember, you’ve got to stay up with him (her father) when they’ve all gone.”

Once more she was businesslike, thinking of her duty. How could I handle him? We were talking tactics, when Arnold Shaw himself entered the room. At first sight, he didn’t look a martinet, much less a puritan. He was short, well-padded, with empurpled cheeks and a curving, malicious, mimic’s mouth. He kissed his daughter, shook my hand, poured himself a lavish Scotch, and told us: “Well, that’s polished off the paper for today.”

He was an obsessively conscientious administrator. He was also a genuine scholar. He had started life as an inorganic chemist, decided that he wasn’t good enough, and taken up the history of chemistry, out of which he had made a name. In this university the one person who had won international recognition was young Leonard Getliffe. After him, a long way after, in a modest determined fashion, carrying on with his scholarship after he had ‘polished off the paper’, came the Vice-Chancellor himself. It ought to have counted to him for virtue. It might have done, if he could have resisted making observations about his colleagues and his fellow Vice-Chancellors. It wasn’t long since he had told me about one of the latter, with the utmost gratification: “I wouldn’t mind so much that he’s never written a book. But I do think it’s a pity that he’s never read one.”

That night he moved restlessly about the drawing-room, carrying glasses, stroking his daughter’s hair. The dinner was a routine piece of entertaining, part of the job which he must have gone through many times: but he was nervous. As soon as the first car drove up the drive, he became more nervous and more active. When the Gearys came in, he was pushing drinks into their hands before they could sit down. Denis Geary, who had been a small boy at my old school just before I left it, gave me a good-natured wink; he was the headmaster of a new comprehensive school, nominated to the Court by the local authority, a relaxed and competent man, not easily put out. The Hargraves followed them in, not as relaxed, knowing no one there except through Court meetings and dinners such as this: both of them diffident, descendants of Quaker manufacturers who had made tidy — not excessive — fortunes in the town. Mrs Hargrave, true to her teetotal ancestry, asked timidly for a tomato juice, which with a flourish Arnold Shaw produced. Then Leonard Getliffe entered, black-haired, white-faced, handsome in a Mediterranean fashion: he couldn’t help his eyes searching for Vicky as he shook hands.

Arnold Shaw was settling them all down, braced on the balls of his feet: there was a buzz of titular enunciation. The mention of Lord Getliffe — Professor Getliffe’s father, Arnold Shaw found it desirable to explain — was frequent: there was a good deal of Sir Lewis-ing. But he was not only being nervous, active and snobbish, but also peremptory. The party still had the first drinks in hand, Shaw had only just sat down himself at last, when he gave an order.

“About the Court meeting — discussion tonight forbidden,” he announced.

His bright hot eyes swept round the room. Some were relieved, one could feel, but not Denis Geary.

“That’s going a bit far, Vice-Chancellor,” he said. He was hawk-nosed, grizzled, tough as well as harmonious, no man’s pushover. He was also a figure in local progressive politics: he had come prepared to argue, not just to dine out.

“Absolutely forbidden.”

“With respect—” Denis began.

“Host’s privilege,” said Arnold Shaw.

Denis looked over at me, gave a slight shrug.

“If you say so,” he said with a good grace. He knew when not to force an issue: recently I had often thought that he could have been a good politician on a bigger scale.

“Nothing contentious tonight,” said Arnold Shaw, rubbing it in. “We’re going to enjoy ourselves.”

That was one of the inapposite remarks, I thought, as we went in to dinner, and I sat on Vicky’s right hand. For Denis Geary, at any rate, despite his good manners, the night had become pointless. For his wife also: she spoke in a soft Midland voice like my father’s but was as firm as her husband. As dinner began, at my end of the table I had to exert myself to keep any sort of conversation going. And yet the meal was superb. Arnold Shaw indulged in food and drink; in the Residence both were better than at any private house I knew, out of comparison better than at great houses such as Basset. Dinner that night was as good as ever: borsch, whitebait, tournedos Rossini: while Arnold Shaw was jumping up and down, going round the table with decanters, buttling. There was plenty of buttling to be done: he loved wine, and was more knowledgeable about it than any of my old Cambridge colleagues: wine drinking of that quality didn’t happen nowadays among my friends.

The food and drink ought to have acted as a social lubricant. But they didn’t. To most of the party they were an embarrassment. The Hargraves were rich, but they went in for austerely simple living. The Gearys weren’t at all austere but didn’t understand fine wine or the wine badinage that Shaw insisted on exchanging with me. I was a light eater, though out of politeness I was doing my best. Leonard was gulping down the drink, hoping to see Vicky before the night was over. As so often, Arnold Shaw could not put a foot right.

In fact, he was proceeding, I could hear down the table, to put two feet wrong. He at least was enjoying his meal, and even more his wine: he was not a heavy drinker, I had never seen him drunk, but alcohol made him combative. He was choosing the occasion to parade himself as an extreme reactionary; in particular an extreme reactionary about education. He flourished his views, vigorous and bantam-bright, in front of the Gearys, who in the terms of that period believed the exact opposite, and the Hargraves, who spent their money on benefactions. “You’re all wrong about education,” he was saying. “Quite wrong. Education isn’t social welfare. You’re quite wrong about universities. A university isn’t anything like what you think. Or it oughtn’t to be.” He went on, with a kind of ferocious jocularity, temper not far beneath the surface, making himself clear. A university was a place of learning. No more, no less. The senior members existed to add to knowledge. If they couldn’t do that, they shouldn’t be there. Some of them had to teach. The students existed only to be taught. They came to learn. They weren’t there for social therapy. They weren’t there to be made useful to the state: that was someone else’s job. Very few people could either add to knowledge, or even acquire it. If they couldn’t, get rid of them. He wanted fewer university students, not more. Fewer and better. This university ought to be half its present size.

I heard Hargrave, who didn’t speak often, say that he couldn’t agree. I heard Denis Geary arguing patiently, and turned my head away. I met Vicky’s frown, troubled and cross. I tried to distract her, but she was on edge, like someone conducting an intolerable interview, waiting to call time.

For myself, I couldn’t intervene: Shaw thought that I was not stupid, but misguided, perhaps deliberately so, and that provoked him more. I let my thoughts drift, wondering why, when I was young, I hadn’t known Denis Geary better. He was a good man, and his character had worn well: he had become more interesting than many who had once, for me, outshone him. But, of course, one doesn’t in youth really choose one’s friends: it is only later, perhaps too late, that one wishes, with something like the obverse of nostalgia, that it had been possible to choose.

The men alone, the port, more of the political testimony of Arnold Shaw. But, despite the luxurious meals, parties at the Residence had a knack of finishing early. All the guests had left, with suitable expressions of reluctance, by 10.45.

Tyres ground on the gravel, and Arnold returned to the drawing-room, lips pursed in triumph.

“I call that a good party,” he proclaimed to Vicky and me, challenging us to deny it. Then he said to Vicky, affectionate, reproachful: “But I must say, you might have kept young Getliffe behind a bit—”

I had to save her. I said: “Look, Arnold, I do rather want a word with you.”

“About what?”

“You know about what, don’t you?”

He glared at me with hot, angry eyes. He decided that there was nothing for it, and said with increasing irascibility that we had better go to his study.

Before I had sat down, beside the reading lamp in front of the scholar’s bookshelves, ladder close by, he said: “I warn you, it’s no use.”

“Listen to me for a minute.”

“It’s no use.”

“I’m thinking of you,” I said.

“I don’t want anyone to think of me.”

What I had just told him happened to be true. I was not exerting myself, and not crossing wills, entirely — or even mainly — for Vicky’s sake. I should have been hard put to it to define my feeling for him, but it contained strata both of respect and affection. Whether he believed that or not, I didn’t know: he was not used to being liked: if someone did appear to like him, it affected him with something between exasperation and surprise.

He poured out whiskies for us both, but became more ugly-tempered still. It was the kind of temper that is infectious, and I had to make myself keep my own. I told him that tomorrow’s meeting wasn’t just a matter of form: if he pressed for the Court to confirm his verdict, then he would certainly get a majority: some would vote against, certainly Geary, probably Leonard Getliffe and two or three of the younger academics. I should, I said in a matter-of-fact tone, vote against it myself.

“Vote against anything you like,” he snapped.

“I shall,” I said.

He would get a clear majority. But didn’t he realise that most of the people voting for him nevertheless thought he had been too severe?

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It is, you know,” I said.

I tried another tactic. He must admit, I said, that most of the people we knew — probably most people in the whole society — didn’t really regard fornication as a serious offence. In secret they didn’t regard it as an offence at all.

“So much the worse for them,” he said.

How could he be so positive? I was getting rougher. Most people couldn’t find any moral sanction for such an attitude. I couldn’t. Where did he get his?

“That’s my business.”

“Not if it affects us all.”

“I’m not going to talk about my moral sanctions. I’m not going to talk about fornication in general.” His cheeks had gone puce. “We’re talking about a university, which you seem to have forgotten. We’re talking about a university which I’m in charge of. While I’m in charge of it, I’m not going to allow promiscuous fornication. I don’t see that that needs explaining. It gets in the way of everything a university stands for. Once you turn a blind eye, you’d make nonsense of the place before you could look round.”

Then I used my last resource. I said that I too was concerned for the university: and that he was valuable to it. He would never get any credit for that. But he had a single-minded passion for academic merit. As a Vice-Chancellor he couldn’t do some things, but he could do one superlatively: that is, he was a connoisseur of academic promise with as great accuracy as he was a connoisseur of wine. It wasn’t an accident that this obscure university had put in a bid for Leonard Getliffe. And Leonard Getliffe, though much the best of his collection, was not the only one. He had backed his judgment, appointed three full professors in their twenties and thirties: so that the university was both better staffed, and more adventurously staffed, than any of its class.

I hadn’t been flattering him. That was the fact. For the first time I had touched him. The smouldering rage dropped down for an instant, and he said: “Well, I’ve got hold of some good men.” He said it humbly.

If he left the place, no one else would have the same gift, I said. And it was possible that he would have to leave. You couldn’t fight all your opponents on all fronts. He was making opponents of people who needn’t be: they thought that he wasn’t living in the climate of his time: he gave them some excuse.

“I’ve no use for the climate of my time. To hell with it,” he said.

All I wanted him to do — I was being patient — was to make some compromise. The slightest compromise. Even just by permitting the four students to withdraw, as though of their own free will.

“I’ll compromise when I can,” he said. “Not when I can’t.”

I told him, as straight and hard as I was able, that if ever there was an occasion to offer a token compromise, then tomorrow was the time. With an angry pout, eyes flat and fixed, he shook his head.

I had had enough, and sat back, silent. Then he said, not so much in a conciliatory manner but as though he wanted me to understand: “I’ll tell you this. You say they may want to get rid of me. That’s their business. They won’t find it so easy as they think. But if I decide that I’m doing the place more harm than good, then I shall go next day.”

He had spoken in a brisk tone, his anger quite subsided, rather as though he were stating his plans for his summer holiday. In precisely the same tone, he added: “I shall decide. And I shan’t ask anyone else.”

Even more briskly, he said good night, and at something like a trot went out of the room and upstairs. I noticed that the lights were still on in the drawing-room, and there I found Vicky waiting up.

“Any change?” she asked.

“None,” I said.

She swore. “He’s hopeless.”

Then she, who usually was considerate, who noticed one’s physical state, went on as though I were neither jaded nor tired. Couldn’t I still do something tomorrow? I was used to this kind of business: couldn’t I find a way to smooth things over?

I’d try, of course, I said. But in real conflicts, technique never counted; when people clashed head on it was no use being tactful. I let myself say that, discouraging her because she was nagging at me, and I needed just to go to bed.

She seemed selfishly, or even morbidly, preoccupied about her father. But it was not truly so. No, she was compensating to herself because she did not want to think of him at all. She was dutiful, she could not shrug off what a daughter ought to feel and do. It was another kind of love, however, which was possessing her. She wanted to guard her father’s well-being, she wanted to get her conscience clear — so that she could forget it all and lose herself, as though on the edge of sleep, in thoughts of happiness.

3: Meeting

MEETINGS. To twist an old statement, all happy meetings are like one another: every unhappy meeting is unhappy in its own fashion. But was that true? I had been to plenty of unhappy meetings in my time. Whether they were trivial or secret or (by the world’s standards) important, they all had a family resemblance. So had the Court meeting that Wednesday morning.

It began uncomfortably quiet, the good-mornings muted in the long room. The room was both extravagantly long and as light as though we were sitting in the open air, since one side was all window, looking southwards on to an arena-like court. The unrelieved lightness of the room — I had thought, on occasions before this one — drew people apart, not together. It was like the whole range of the university buildings, handsome, stark, functional, slapped down at prodigious expense in the fields, four miles outside the town. The Victorian buildings of the old college, where I had first listened to George Passant, had been abandoned, turned over to offices in one of the streets where my son and I had walked the previous afternoon. No dark rooms now: no makeshifts: no, the wide campus, the steel, concrete and glass, the stretches of window, at the same time bare, luxurious, unshadowed, costly.

Arnold sat at the end of the table, behind him on the wall — incongruous in the midst of the architectural sheen — a coloured plaque of the university arms. There were ten people on each side, Hargrave, who had some honorific title in the university, on the Vice-Chancellor’s right, Geary two or three places down, looking at ease and interested. I sat on Arnold Shaw’s left, and on my side sat Leonard Getliffe and several other academics, most of them under forty. The rest of the Court were older, hearty middle-aged local politicians and businessmen, four or five well-dressed strong-built women.

Item Number 3 on the agenda read, with the simple eloquence of official documents, Appeal by Four Students against Decision of Disciplinary Committee. The first two items were routine, and Arnold Shaw, who was a brisk decisive chairman, wiped them off. Then he said, in the same unexpansive fashion, not encouraging comment or setting people free to talk, that they all knew the background of the next piece of business: he had circulated a memorandum: the students had appealed to the Court, as was their constitutional right: they had now asked to appear before the Court in person. Whether they had this right as well was open to question: there was no ruling and no precedent. But Sir Lewis Eliot, as the students’ representative on the Court, had presented an official request from the student body — that the four students should be given the privilege. He, Arnold Shaw, had with some dubiety granted it. As to the case itself the facts were not in dispute. There was nothing to be said about them. We had better have the students in straight away.

Better for them if they had not come, I had thought all along. I had tried to persuade them, for I had interviewed the four of them more than once. But the young man Pateman, who was the strongest character among them, was also a good deal of a sea lawyer: there were other sea lawyers among the union leaders: they were insisting on appearance before the Court as an inalienable right. I found it distinctly tiresome. So far as the four had any chance at all, they would worsen it if they came and argued: I knew the impression they would make: I knew also that one of the girls had already lost her nerve.

As Arnold Shaw had said, picking up the official phrase, the facts were not in dispute. They could hardly have been less in dispute. About 3.0 a.m. on a winter morning (actually it happened early in March) the assistant warden of one of the women’s hostels had gone into a sitting-room. It was pure coincidence that she should have done so; she was having a sleepless night, and thought she remembered seeing a magazine there. She had switched on the light; on the sofa lay one naked pair, on an improvised bed another. What conversation then took place didn’t seem to have been put on record. The assistant warden (who was both sensible and embarrassed) knew both girls, they were members of the hostel and had their own rooms upstairs. Presumably she found out the men’s names at once: at any rate, next day she had no option but to report them. It was as simple as that.

We had better have the students in straight away, Arnold Shaw was saying. He pressed a bell, told the attendant to bring Miss Bolt.

Myra Bolt came in. She was a big girl, pretty in a heavy-featured, actressish way: at close quarters she rolled her eyes and one noticed that her skin was large-pored. She was quite self-possessed that morning. I had not yet seen her otherwise: it wasn’t she whose nerve had snapped. She was hearty and loud-voiced, and her parents were much better off than those of most of the students. Her father was a stockbroker who had a country house in Sussex. It was easy to imagine her, a little younger, taking riding lessons and being eager to have a roll in the bushes with the groom. She hadn’t exactly boasted or confided, but let me know that something of that kind had duly taken place. At this time, she was twenty, in her second year, academically not much good.

The table was bad for interviewing, far too long, the candidate (or, that morning, the appellant) much too far away. Arnold Shaw, though a good chairman, was a bad interviewer. He just snapped out questions, his mind channelled as though he were wearing blinkers. That morning he was not only a bad interviewer but a hostile one, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“Miss Bolt,” he said. “We understand that you have representations to make to the Court. What are they?”

Myra Bolt wasn’t overawed, but she wasn’t specially used to formal speeches. I had told them the kind of questions to expect, but not that one, not as the first.

“Well—” she began inconclusively, like someone saying goodbye at a railway station.

I thought that I had to step in. She wasn’t a favourite of mine: there was only one of the four whom I was really fond of, and it wasn’t she. But it was my job to see they got a hearing. I said — “Vice-Chancellor, I wonder if I can help the Court a little, and Miss Bolt? Perhaps I could take her through what the students wish to say?”

How often had I seen others start a clash like that, voices smoothed down by official use? Arnold Shaw glanced at me with aggressive eyes — but he couldn’t have stopped me easily. He seemed to like having an adversary, me in particular. He nodded, and projected my name.

I began by one or two innocuous questions: how long had she been living in the hostel? How well did she know the other girl, Joyce Darby? Not all that well, said Myra: just to have coffee with, or go out with for a drink. I had two objectives: I wanted to domesticate the whole business, to make them look more acceptable, so that they might express some sort of regret (which I knew that two of them at least, Myra among them, weren’t inclined to do). Then I wanted them to make a responsible case about their careers: what would happen to them if they were thrown out of this university, and so couldn’t get into another? The more professional it all sounded, the easier for them — and, I had hoped until the night before, the easier for Arnold Shaw.

How had they ever got into it? They didn’t usually have this kind of party, did they? I was speaking casually. Myra answered: no, there’d never been anything like it before. She added: “I suppose we all got carried away. You know how it is.”

“Had you been drinking?”

“A bit. I must say, it was a bit off.”

That was mollifying. But she was preoccupied — as she had been when I talked to her — by the fact of the two couples in the same room, what in her language they called an orgy.

“If David and I had gone off in my car that evening, and the other two in somebody else’s, then I don’t suppose we should have heard another word about it.”

That was less mollifying. Across the table, nearer to Myra, one of the women members of the Court broke in. She had a beaky profile, fine blue eyes, and a high voice. She said, in a sharp, sisterly, kindly tone: “You didn’t think you were doing anything wrong?”

“That depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”

“But how do you look at it?”

“Well,” said Myra, “I’m sorry other people got dragged in. That wasn’t so good.”

The women member nodded. “But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I mean, do you think you’ve done anything wrong?”

Myra answered, more lucidly than usual: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in making love, if you’re not hurting anybody else.” She went on: “I agree with Mrs What-do-you call her, wasn’t she an actress, that it doesn’t matter what people do so long as they don’t stop the traffic.”

It was like her, in her bumbling fashion, to get the reference wrong. Some of the Court wondered, however, where she had picked it up. Probably from one of their student advisers, trying to rehearse them.

But, bumbling or not, when Denis Geary asked her about the consequences of the punishment, she did her best. Denis was playing in with me: he was experienced, he knew the tone of the people round this table much better than I did: he didn’t sound indulgent or even compassionate: but what did the punishment mean? To herself, she said, nothing but a headache. She could live at home or get a job with one of her father’s friends (what she meant was that she would find someone, probably someone quite unlike her student fancies, to marry within a year or two). But to the others, who wanted careers, it meant they couldn’t have them. Unless some other university would take them in. But they were being expelled in squalid circumstances: would another institution look at them? David Llewellyn, for instance (he had been Myra’s partner: she didn’t pretend to love him, but she spoke up for him) — he wanted to be a scientist. What chance would he have now?

“Has any member of the Court anything further to ask Miss Bolt?” Arnold Shaw looked implacably round the table. “Have you anything further you wish to say, Miss Bolt? Thank you.”

With the next girl, I had one aim and only one, which was to get her out of the room with the least possible strain. She wasn’t in a fit state to be interviewed. That she showed, paradoxically helping me, by beginning to cry as soon as Arnold Shaw asked his first formal question. “Miss Darby, we understand—” She was a delicate-looking girl, actually a year older than Myra, but looking much younger. She appeared drab and mousey, but dress her up, make her happy, and she would have her own kind of charm. She came from a poor family in industrial Lancashire, a family which had been severe with her already. She was a bright student, expected to get a First, and that, together with her tears, made Shaw gentler with her. All she said was: “I was over-influenced. That’s as much as I can tell you.”

It was not gallant. In secret (it sounded hard, but I had seen more of her than the others had) I thought that she was not only frightened, which was natural enough, but self-regarding and abnormally vain.

She spoke in a tiny voice. Quite gently, Shaw told her to speak up. She couldn’t. Whether she was crying or not, she wouldn’t have been able to. Anyone used to interviewing would have known that there are some people who can’t. Anyone used to interviewing would also have known that — despite all superstitions to the contrary — the over-confident always get a little less good treatment than they deserve, and girls like this a little more.

Someone asked her, who had influenced her? She said: “The rest of them.” She wouldn’t, to do her justice, put special blame on Dick Pateman, her own lover. One of the academics who had taught her, asked her what, if she continued with her degree work, she hoped to do? She wanted to go on to a Ph.D. What on? Henry James. She began to cry again, as though she felt herself shut out from great expectations, and Arnold Shaw was in a hurry to ask the dismissive questions.

It had done harm: it might have been worse. David Llewellyn, though he was as nervous as she was, gave a good performance. This was the one I liked, a small neat youth, sensitive and clever. When one compared him and Myra, there was no realistic doubt about who had done the seducing. Probably she was his first woman (they had been sleeping together some months before the party), and I expected that he was proud of it and boasted to his friends. But how he got led into the ‘orgy’ I couldn’t understand, any more than if it had been myself at the same age. When I had asked him, he looked lost, and said: “Collective hysteria. It can’t have been anything else.”

After his name was announced, people round the table may have been surprised to hear him talk in a sub-cockney accent. His parents, I had discovered, kept a small shop in Southend. Of the four of them, only Pateman lived with his family in the town. But then, the great majority of the university’s students came from all over the country, to be put up in the new hostels: just as the local young men and women travelled to other parts of the country to be put up in identical hostels elsewhere. It might have seemed odd, but not to anyone acclimatised to the English faith in residential education.

Llewellyn did well, without help from me or Geary. He was ready to apologise for what had happened: it had given trouble, it had stirred up a scandal. The circumstances were bad. So far as they were concerned, he had no defence. The party was inexcusable. He was nervous but precise. No one pressed him. If they had, he would have been honest. His private sexual behaviour was his own affair. On that he and Myra had made a compact: and their student political adviser was backing them. But Llewellyn didn’t require any backing. He was ambitious, and shaking for his future. He had his own code of belief, though. An attempt by Shaw or one of the others to make him deny it would have got nowhere.

However, that didn’t happen. Leonard Getliffe, not preoccupied as on the night before, asked him some questions about his physics course: Leonard, sharp-witted, was talking like a master of his job, but without any condescension at all: the answers sounded sharp-witted also.

In the silence, after he had left and we were waiting for Pateman, someone said: “I must say, that seems a pity.”

Across the table, Leonard Getliffe said: “He has talent.”

For the next quarter-of-an-hour, Dick Pateman sat at one end of the table arguing with the Vice-Chancellor and the others. Pateman’s head was thrown back, whether he was listening or speaking: he had staring light eyes in deep orbits, a diagonal profile, and a voice with no give in it. Less than any of the others, he did not want to make human contact: with his contemporaries, this gave him a kind of power; he seemed to them uninfluenceable, waiting only for them to be influenced. It was the kind of temperament which wasn’t necessarily linked with ability — he was not clever, he ought to have been finishing his degree but had been dropped back a year — but which is sometimes dangerous and not often negligible. It did not seem negligible at the table that morning — though his logic-chopping and attempts at legalism were stirring up Arnold Shaw’s contempt, which Pateman met by a contempt, chilly and internal, of his own.

On the surface it might have sounded like a trade union boss negotiating with an employer. On one side stood the student body, Pateman was grating away (I had anticipated this, tried to stop it, could only sit by): on the other “the authorities”. It was necessary for matters of discipline to be settled by the two sides in combination.

“Nonsense,” said Arnold Shaw.

Shaw’s temper was seething. The young man seemed to have no temper. He went on: “If that’s the attitude the authorities take up, then the students will have to join forces with students of other universities—”

“Let them,” said Arnold Shaw.

So it went on. The authorities had no right to impose their own laws unilaterally on the students, said Pateman. The students had their own rights.

“In that sense,” said Shaw, “you have none at all.”

Pateman said that they were free citizens. They paid their fees. They were prepared to collaborate in drafting laws for the university, and would abide by them. They accepted that the authorities had their own rights about examinations. Everything else should be settled by mutual consent. Or, alternatively, the students should simply be subject to the laws of the land. In the present case, there was no suggestion that anything had been done contrary to the laws of the land.

“Look here,” said Denis Geary, “this isn’t very profitable.”

“I was speaking for the students—”

“You’d better speak for yourselves. You’ve behaved like damned fools, and messy damned fools, and you know it. You’d better give us one good reason why we should be spending our time here this morning—”

Young Pateman gave something like a smile. He must have realised, since Geary was well-known in the town, that here was one of their best hopes: he didn’t mind, he was enough of a politician to be easy with rough words.

“I don’t take back the students’ case,” he began, and Geary broke in: “Drop that.”

“I should have thought the practical thing you’ve got to consider this morning,” Pateman went on, in precisely the same ungiving tone, “is whether you want to ruin us.”

“Ruin’s a big word,” said Geary.

“What else do you think you’re doing?”

The Vice-Chancellor was interrupting, but Denis Geary had his own authority and went on: “I want to know one thing. How much do you feel responsible?”

“What do you mean, responsible?”

“If it hadn’t been for you, would this have happened?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You’re the oldest of this group, aren’t you?”

“Joyce is older than I am. So is David.”

“Never mind about calendar age. You’re a grown man, aren’t you?”

He was young enough to be softened, for an instant. Geary asked: “Do you think it’s a good idea to get hold of youngsters like this—”

“It depends on the co-operation I get.”

The answer was brash. Geary used more force: “But you ought to feel responsible, oughtn’t you?”

“I don’t know about that.” Pateman was repeating himself.

“You do feel responsible, though, don’t you?”

There was a long pause. Pateman said, slowly, his voice more grating still: “I don’t want to see anyone ruined.”

Geary glanced at me, a partner’s glance. That was the most he could extract. I touched the Vice-Chancellor’s sleeve. He didn’t want to let Pateman go, but he acquiesced.

Coffee was brought in. It was about a quarter past eleven, and we had started at ten. Motion: that the Court confirms the decision of the Disciplinary Committee.

In the unconfined, hygienic room the air was tight. Not, so far, with anger: remarks were quiet: there was curiosity, unease, something else. I heard, or thought I heard, someone whispering about the university premises. Arnold Shaw stared down the table. He wasn’t pleased to have lost his leadership during the hearings: he was asserting it now.

“There is a motion before the Court,” he said. “Before I put it, I should like to hear whether anyone wishes to discuss it.”

Pause. One of the academics spoke up: “Some of us are wondering, I think, Vice-Chancellor, whether it isn’t possible to make distinctions between these students—”

Shaw sat, high-coloured, without answering. Others were doing that. It was a line some were eager for. Surely one of the girls had been dominated. Didn’t she deserve different treatment (I noticed that the handsome blue-eyed woman, though she sat silent, had her own view of Joyce Darby)? No one had any use for Pateman. There was a great deal of talk, scrappy, some of it merciful. Someone said: “Whosoever shall cause one of my little ones—” and trailed off. I caught the word “degenerates”. It was left for Leonard Getliffe to make a special case.

“I should like the Court to give consideration to young Llewellyn. I can speak for the physics department. He’s worth saving. I said before, he has talent. He’s certainly the best student I’ve taught here. I don’t know about the general position. I mean, I can’t reach absolute conclusions about student behaviour. I should say, in terms of character as I understand it, he is a decent young man.”

Leonard was speaking politely but without concessions. On his clever conceptualiser’s face there was a half-smile, a mannerism which some found irritating. It meant nothing. He spoke like a man sure of himself. Underneath the fine nerves, he was more virile than most. If Vicky had been an older woman, she would have been bound to perceive it. Yet it had quite escaped her. I wondered if, free that morning from his obsessive love, he had time to be bitter because it was weakening his manhood, just as, younger than he was, but in this same town, and for the identical cause, I had been bitter myself.

I wondered also if he felt envy for the culprits. Envy because, instead of being prisoners of love, they took sex as though it didn’t matter. Or because they just took sex as it came. At various places round the table, through the curious unease, through both the mercifulness and the disapproval, there had been those stabs of envy.

He went on: “There is another point. I admit that it’s a slightly more abstract one. The more people the university sends down, the less penalty it really is. That is, the importance of the gesture is inversely proportional to the number involved. If you send the whole university down, no one will care. If you send one person down, then that is a genuine penalty.”

He had spoiled his case, I thought irritably. That was what the theoreticians called cat-humour. Why didn’t they keep it for their seminars?

One of his colleagues, more worldly than he was, thought the same. “Never mind that,” he said. “Vice-Chancellor, going back to Professor Getliffe’s first point, there does seem to be some feeling for discretionary treatment on behalf of two of these students. We should like to ask, rather strongly, whether that isn’t possible?”

Shaw had been quiet, like a discreet chairman letting the discussion run. Now he looked round, took his time, and said: “No. I have to tell the Court it is not possible.”

There were noises of disappointment, but he was in control.

“No. The Court must face the position. This is all or nothing. If you ask me for the reason, I give it you in one word. Justice.”

Denis Geary said that justice could be unjust, but for once he was over-weighted.

“No,” said Arnold Shaw. “It would be wrong to distinguish between these four. Morally wrong. There are no respectable grounds for doing so. Age. Some people might think that a respectable ground, though I should beg to differ. In any case, the students whom some members want to favour are the two oldest. Academic ability. We are not judging a matter of academic ability. We are judging a matter of university discipline and moral behaviour. No one wants to deprive the university of able students. We haven’t got enough. But you can’t make a special dispensation for the able when they’ve committed exactly the same offence. Personally I am sorry that Pateman ever became a student here — but to dismiss him and let others stay, who are precisely as guilty on the facts, simply because they might get better classes in their degrees — well, I could have no part in it. I’m surprised that anyone could find it morally defensible. Finally, influence. It’s easy to think we know who is responsible. We don’t. We can have our suspicions — but suspicions aren’t a basis for just action. Anyone who is certain he knows what happens between two people is taking too much on himself. In this case, it would be utterly unjustified to go behind the facts. I repeat, I for one could have no part in it.”

Quiet. It was time to turn the argument. I said, perhaps I might put another point of view. “Do,” said Arnold Shaw, firm and beady-eyed.

I was deliberately cool. I didn’t want to get entangled in the legalities of the case, I remarked. So far as they went, the Vice-Chancellor’s statement was unanswerable. And everyone round the table understood the position in which the Disciplinary Committee had found themselves. All that any of us wished to say was, weren’t we making too heavy weather of it? The Committee had been obliged to take action: that was accepted. But wasn’t the penalty, now we had had time to realise the repercussions, too severe? Send the students down for the rest of the academic year, and no one would have asked a question. But were we really intending to cut them off from finishing their university education anywhere? It wouldn’t have happened at other institutions or American colleges that I knew. Wouldn’t it be fairly easy for the Committee to have another look, just as an act of grace?

Arnold Shaw turned half-left towards me: “Sir Lewis, you’ve just said that this wouldn’t have happened at other institutions?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I did say that.”

“You were a don yourself once, weren’t you?”

That was a rhetorical question.

“Might I ask,” said Arnold Shaw, “what would have happened at your own college if undergraduates had behaved like this?”

I answered that I couldn’t recall a case.

“The question,” he persisted, “seems to me a fair one.”

Sometimes, I said, I had known blind eyes turned.

“The question,” Arnold Shaw went on, “still seems to me a fair one. In your college. Two of your own undergraduates and two women. Or in a room in Newnham. What about it?”

He had won that point, I was thinking to myself. I had to remember a time when Roy Calvert nearly missed a fellowship, because he was suspected, as a matter of gossip, not of proof, of keeping a mistress.

“I grant you that,” I said with reluctance. “Yes, they’d have been got rid of.”

Then I recovered myself. “But I want to remind you that that was getting on for thirty years ago. The climate of opinion has changed since then.” I was trying to work on the meeting. “So far as I can gather the sense of this Court today, the general feeling is very different from what it would have been thirty years ago. Or even ten.”

Some murmurs of support. One or two noes. I was right, though. The tone that morning had been calmer and more relaxed than in our youth most of us could have imagined.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t believe in climates of opinion,” said Shaw. “That seems to me a dangerous phrase. But even if opinions have changed, are you maintaining that moral values have changed too?”

I had had too much practice at committees to be drawn. Arnold Shaw wore a curving, sharp-edged smile, enjoying the debate, confident that he had had the better of it. So he had. But, with some, he was doing himself harm. They wanted a bit of give-and-take, not his brand of dialectic.

I was having to make my next, and final, move. I looked across at Denis Geary, the only useful ally there, wishing that we could confer. I was trying to think of two opposite aims at once, which was a handicap in any kind of politics. On the one hand, I didn’t want Shaw to do himself more harm (about that Geary would have been indifferent): if we pressed it to a vote, the Vice-Chancellor would get his support, but — as I had told him flatly the night before — it would be remembered against him. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to surrender. For the students’ sake? For the sake of the old-Adam-ego, for after all I was fighting a case? That didn’t matter. Someone was saying, and this time the words were clear: “If only it hadn’t happened on the University premises.”

I had been reflecting only for moments. There wasn’t time to delay. But I found myself infected by a subterranean amusement. Arnold Shaw had made me think back to my college in the thirties: and, hearing that single comment, I was thinking back again. A college meeting. Report of a pyromaniac. He had set fire to his sitting-room once before, and that was thought to be accidental. Now he had done it again. One of the senior fellows, our aesthete, old Eustace Pilbrow, raised his voice. The young man must be got out of college at once. That day. But he must be found (since Pilbrow was a kind man) a very good set of lodgings in the town.

“Vice-Chancellor,” I said, returning to the occasion, “I have a simple proposition to make.”

“Yes?”

“I suggest we take no formal action at all. Let’s leave it over till the next meeting of the Court” (which was due to take place two months ahead, in June).

“With respect, I don’t see the force of that.” Shaw’s lips were pouting.

“There is a little force in it.” I explained that to me, and I thought to some others, the formality and the procedures were not important. We should be content, if we could save some chance for the students’ careers. Given two months, Leonard Getliffe could talk to his physicist colleagues in other universities: come clean about the events: some department might be willing to take Llewellyn in. And so with the others. Many of us had contacts. Then, if and when they were placed elsewhere, the Court would be happy, or wouldn’t worry further about its own disciplinary step.

“Not satisfactory,” said Arnold Shaw, but Geary broke in: “Vice-Chancellor, in the circumstances nothing is going to be satisfactory. But I must say, I’ve never heard of a compromise which made things so easy for the powers-that-be. You’re not being voted against, you’re just being asked to wait a minute.”

“It’s not even rational.”

“Vice-Chancellor,” Geary was speaking heavily, “it will be difficult for me, and I know I’m speaking for others, if you can’t accept this.”

Hargrave coughed. Under his white hair with its middle parting, his face, often quietly worried, looked more so. He was more distressed by the hearing than anyone there. He rarely spoke on the Court, but now he forced himself.

“It’s usually right to wait, if one is not hurting anyone.”

“You’ve listened to those four this morning,” said Shaw.

Hargrave kneaded his temples, like one with a migraine, and then said with surprising firmness, “But if we wait a little, we shan’t hurt anyone, shall we?”

Even then, I doubted whether Shaw was going to budge. At last he shook his head.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “But if you want me to put your motion (he turned to me) to the Court, I’m willing do to so. As for myself, I shall abstain.”

With bad grace, he sat in the chair while the hands went up. Only three against. There was a susurration of whispers, even giggles, as people stirred, ready to leave.

It wasn’t a rational compromise, Arnold Shaw had complained. But then he was expecting too much. I had twice heard an elder statesman of science announce, with the crystalline satisfaction of someone producing a self-evident truth, that sensible men usually reached sensible conclusions. I had seen my brother cock an eyebrow, in recognition of that astonishing remark. I had myself reported it, deadpan, to others — who promptly came to the conclusion that I believed it myself.

It was not even a rational compromise. I packed up my papers, quite pleased with the morning’s work. Others were talking, glad to have put it behind them. They were used, as people were in a society like ours, highly articulated, but so articulated that most lives touched only by chance, to hearing names, even to meeting persons in the flesh, once, twice, then not again. To most of the Board, the four we had interviewed were strangers, flickering in and out. Myra Bolt, David Llewellyn — they had swum into others’ consciousness that morning, like someone sitting next to one in an aircraft, talking of where he had come from and where he was going to. To people round the table, the names they had heard weren’t likely often to recur. That seemed entirely normal to them, just as it so often seemed to me.

4: A Simple Home

YET for me, later that day, one of the names flickered, not out, but in again. I had arranged to spend another night at the Residence, in order to have my ritual drink with George Passant, and was sitting alone in the drawing-room after tea. Vicky had not returned from hospital, and Arnold Shaw had gone to his vice-cancellarial office for another of his compulsive paper clearing spells.

I was called to the telephone. This was Dick Pateman, a voice said, lighter and more smooth than it sounded face to face: he was anxious to see me. He knew about the result, or rather the non-result? Yes, he had been told: he was anxious to see me. Well, I accepted that, it was all in the job. In any case, I couldn’t stay with him long. Where, I asked? At the Residence? Not much to my surprise, he said no. Would I come to his own home? I asked for the address, and thought I remembered the road, or could find it.

Getting off the bus at the Park gates, I looked down into the town. There was a dip, and then a rise into the evening haze: lights were coming out, below the blur of roofs. On the left, down the New Walk, I used to go to Martineau’s house. I must have looked down, at that density of lights and roofs, many times in those days: not with a Rastignac passion that I was going to take the town, any more than I had felt it looking down at London roofs (that was too nineteenth-century for us), but with some sort of pang, made up of curiosity and, perhaps, a vague, even sentimental, yearning.

I had been over-confident about my local knowledge, and it took me some time to identify the road. This was a part of the town which in the last century had been a suburb, but was so no longer; it certainly wasn’t a slum, for those had gone. It was nothing in particular; a criss-cross of tidy streets, two-storeyed houses, part working-class, part the fringe of the lower middle. I asked my way, but no one seemed clear. So far as I could remember, I had never set foot in those particular backstreets: even in one’s native town, one’s routes were marked out, sharp and defined, like the maps of underground railways.

At last I saw the street sign; on both sides stood terraced houses, the same period, the same red brick, as those my son and I had passed on the way to my father’s room. At the end of the road some West Indians were talking on the pavement. That would have been a novelty years before. So would the sight of cars, at least three, waiting outside houses, including the house I was searching for. The window of the front room gave on the pavement: as in the window of the Residence the night before, a light was shining behind the curtains.

When I rang the bell, Dick Pateman opened the door. His greeting was off-hand, but I scarcely noticed that, since I was puzzled by the smell that wafted out, or one component of it. I was used to the musty smell of small old houses, I had known them all my childhood, and that was present here — but there were also something different in kind, not repulsive but discomforting, which I couldn’t place.

Behind the closed door of the front room, pop music was sounding: but Dick Pateman took me to the next, and only other, door. This would be (I knew it all by heart) the living-room or kitchen. As I went in, Dick Pateman was saying: This is my father and mother.

That I hadn’t bargained on. The room was cluttered, and for an instant my only impression was of the idiosyncratic smell, much stronger. I was shaking hands with a man whose head was thrown back, his hand stretched out, in a gesture one sometimes sees displayed by grandiose personages.

My eyes became clearer. Mr Pateman was taller than his son, with high square shoulders and a heavily muscled, athletic body. His grip on my hand was powerful, and his forearms filled his sleeves. His light blue eyes met mine unblinkingly, rather as though he had been taught that, to make a good impression, it was necessary to look your man straight in the eye. He had sandy hair, pale eyebrows, and a sandy moustache. Under the moustache two teeth protruded a little, his underlip pressed in, with the suggestion of a slight, condescending smile.

“I’ve never met you,” he said, “but I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

I said that he was not to believe it. Mr Pateman, humourlessly, without any softening, said that he did.

Then I shook hands with Mrs Pateman, a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than her husband or son, wrinkled and dark-skinned. She gave me a quick, worried, confiding smile.

As we sat down, I didn’t know why I had been enticed like this, how much the parents knew, nor how to talk to them.

The room was crammed with heavy nineteenth-century furniture. There was a bookcase with a glass window in the far corner, and a piano on the other side. A loose slack fire was smouldering in the grate, and the air was chilly. On the table, upon a white openwork cloth spread upon another cloth of dark green plush, with bobbled fringe, stood a teapot, some crockery, and what looked like the preparations for a “high tea”, though — by the standards of my mother’s friends — a meagre one. Everything was clean: and yet, about the whole room, there hung a curiously dusty air, less like the grime of neglect than like some permanent twilight.

Mrs Pateman asked whether she could help me to some food. When I answered her and said no, her husband smiled, as though I were proving satisfactory.

He himself was eating tinned salmon. He said: “Well, we’re giving them something to think about, I’m glad to say.”

I was still at a disadvantage. This was obviously a reference to the morning’s meeting, and he seemed as invulnerable as his son. If he had been a softer man, worried or even inconsolable because his son’s future was in danger, I should have been more at home. I should have been more at home with Mrs Pateman, who was watching the two of them with shrewd, puzzled anxiety. But, in the presence of the father, it wasn’t in the least like that.

“The best we can do now” — I was feeling my way, speaking to Dick Pateman — “is to try and get you fixed up elsewhere. As soon as we can.”

“That’s not very satisfactory,” said Dick Pateman.

“No,” said Mr Pateman.

“It’s a bad second best,” said Dick — as though he were arguing with me at the end of the long table.

“Some of us,” said Mr Pateman, “aren’t prepared to see our children get the second best.”

I didn’t want to show impatience, though it was displeasingly near. Above all, I didn’t want to give pain, certainly not to Mrs Pateman. I couldn’t speak frankly. With an effort, I said: “You’ve got to regard this as nothing more or less than a friendly talk. I can’t do much. I might be able to give you a little advice, simply because I know the rules of this game, but that’s all.”

Mr Pateman faced me with a set cunning look, which declared that he was not to be taken in. He assumed that I was a man of influence, he had an unqualified faith in what he called “pulling strings”. The more I disclaimed being able to act, the more convinced he was of my Machiavellian power.

Dick argued, so did his father.

I was becoming certain that he didn’t know much, nothing like the full story. Not that Dick had deceived him. He didn’t want to know, he didn’t even want to hear. He was positive that he was right. Obviously his son was being badly used: which meant, and this was how he translated it, that he himself was being badly used. He was a churchgoer, he pointed out to me, assuming, with an air of pitying superiority, that I wasn’t. With a family in distress, I should have expected to feel protective, even though I hadn’t asked to be there, even though I didn’t like them. But Mr Pateman made that impossible. By some extraordinary feat of character or moral legerdemain, he took it for granted that all I had to do was my simple duty. So far as there was any pity flowing, he was pitying me.

It was a long time since I had met a man so self-righteous. And yet his son was self-righteous too. That was what had exacerbated the Court, that billiard ball impregnability in circumstances where self-righteousness didn’t appear to be called for. With a prepotent father like that, some sons would have been worn down. Not this one. There did not seem any tenderness, or even much communication, between them. They treated each other like equal powers, each censorious, each knowing that he was right.

The person I was curious about was Mrs Pateman, not bullied, but excluded from the talk. What could it be like to live here?

Mr Pateman made a practical point, as though I were responsible. If Dick had to transfer to another university (did Dick himself believe it would be all that easy, I was thinking? when was the right time to stop them hoping too much?) he wouldn’t be able to make a contribution to the housekeeping. As it was, he had been doing so out of his student grant.

“The grants are miserable, I suppose you know that,” said Dick, ready to argue another grievance.

“Take him away,” said Mr Pateman, “and he won’t be able to pay a penny. There’ll be nothing coming in.”

I had nothing to say on this topic, but Mr Pateman needed to finish it off. “It’s diabolical,” he said.

Soon afterwards a young woman came in, unobtrusively, slipping into the room. This must, I thought, be Dick’s sister, whom I had just heard of, but not more than that. Although she had only recently come in from work and could not have known of the Court result, she did not make any enquiry, nor even look at her brother. Instead, she was asking for jam. There wasn’t any jam today, said Mr Pateman. There must be jam, she was saying. She was sounding peevish when, with a grandiloquent air, Mr Pateman presented me. She was a small girl, not much bigger than her mother. She had fine eyes, but she turned them away from mine in a manner that could have been either shy or supercilious. In a delicate fashion, she was pretty: but, although she was perhaps only two years older than her brother, she had that kind of feminity which throws a shadow before it: her face was young, yet carried an aura, not really a physical look, of the elderly, almost of the wizened.

They called her Kitty. There was also a mention of someone named Cora: in the conversation I gathered that she and Cora shared, and slept in, the front room. It must have been Cora who had been playing records when I entered the house, which I had only just realised was so packed with people. I had another thought, or half-memory, from something I had heard not long before. Wasn’t this Cora the niece of George Passant, the daughter of one of his sisters who had died young? I asked Kitty: she looked away, gave a sidelong glance, as though she wanted to resist answering me straight.

“I think she is,” she said, with what seemed a meaningless edge of doubt.

Could I have a word with her? George was a lifelong friend; by a coincidence, I should be meeting him in half-an-hour. It was not such a coincidence, though I didn’t tell her so.

Kitty did some more shuffling, then said: “I’ll see if she can come.”

In the time Kitty was out of the room, Mr Pateman had returned to the “diabolical” results of administrative decisions. Then the two young women returned, Cora first. She was tallish, with blunt heavy features, short straight hair; under a plain straight-hanging dress, she was strong-shouldered and stoutly built. I couldn’t see much look of the Passant family, except perhaps a general thick-boned Nordic air. I said that I knew her uncle. She gave an abrupt yes. I said I owed him a lot. She said: “I like George.”

There were a few more words spoken, not many. She volunteered that she didn’t see George much, nowadays. She said to Kitty: “We ought to go and clear things up. The room’s in a mess.”

As they went out, I did not anticipate seeing them again. More people evanescing: it had been the condition of that day. By the side of the two Pateman males, those self-bound men, the girls didn’t make demands on one, not even on one’s attention. True, I felt cold and shut in: but then, the little room was cold and shut in. It was a relief that it was not now so full of people. This “simple home”, as Mr Pateman called it, in one of his protests about Dick’s contribution, pressed upon me. I was growing to dislike the sharp and inescapable smell, strong in the little room, strongest near to Mr Pateman himself. I had now isolated it in my nostrils, though I did not know the explanation, as a brand of disinfectant.

Mrs Pateman was clearing away the tea, Dick — whose manners could not have been regarded as over-elaborate — had gone out, shortly after the girls, and without a word. It was still early, but I could decently leave; I was anticipating the free air outside, when Mr Pateman confronted me with a satisfied smile and said: “Now, we can talk a little business, can’t we?”

Immediately I took it for granted that he was, at last, going to speak seriously about his son. That made me more friendly: I settled in my chair, ready to respond.

“I’m not very happy about things,” he said.

I began to reply, the best practical step was to find Dick a place elsewhere–

He stopped me. “Oh no. I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’ll be all right,” said Mr Pateman. “I’ve done my best for my family and I don’t mind saying, no one could have done more.”

He looked at me, as usual so straight in the eye that I wanted to duck. He wasn’t challenging me, he was too confident for that.

“No,” he went on, “I’m not very happy about my position.”

So that was it. That was why I had been invited, or enticed, to the house that evening.

“Do you realise,” he asked, “that those two young people in the next room are both bringing in more than I am?”

I asked what he was doing. Cashier, he said, in one of the hosiery firms, a small one. Curiously enough, that was a similar job to my father’s, years before. The young women? Secretaries. Fifteen or sixteen pounds a week each, I guessed?

“You’re not far off. It’s a lot of money at twenty-two or three.”

Mr Pateman did not appear to have the same appreciation of the falling value of money as my father, that unexpected financial adviser. But I happened to know the economics of this kind of household, through a wartime personal assistant of mine and her young man. Though Mr Pateman could not realise it, that acquaintanceship, in which I hadn’t behaved with much loyalty, made me more long-suffering towards him and his family now.

“How much are they paying you for their room?” I said.

“If you don’t mind,” Mr Pateman answered, throwing his head back, “we’ll keep our purses to ourselves.”

Anyway, I was thinking, he couldn’t extract a big amount from them — even though, as I now suspected, he was something of a miser, a miser in the old-fashioned technical sense. I had been watching his negotiations with the tea table food. Between them, the two young women must have money to spend: they could run a car: it was strangely different from my own youth in this town, or the youth of my friends.

“My position isn’t right,” said Mr Pateman. “I tell you, it isn’t right.” It was true to this extent, that a middle-aged man in a clerical job might be earning less than a trained girl.

“All I need,” he went on, “is an opportunity.”

I had to hear him out.

“What have you got to offer?”

“If I get an opportunity,” he said, with supreme satisfaction, “I’ll show them what I’ve got to offer.”

I said, he had better tell me about his career. How old was he? Fifty last birthday.

“I must say,” I told him, “I should have thought you were younger.”

“Some people,” said Mr Pateman, “know how to look after themselves.”

Born in Walsall. His parents hadn’t been “too well endowed with this world’s goods” (they had kept a small shop). They had managed to send him to a grammar school. He had stayed on after sixteen: the intention was that he should one day go to a teachers’ training college.

“But you didn’t?”

“Why not?”

A very slight pause. Then Mr Pateman said defiantly: “Ah, thereby hangs a tale.”

For the first time that evening, he was dissatisfied with his account of himself. I wondered how often I had heard a voice change in the middle of a life story. A platitude or a piece of jargon suddenly rang out. It meant that something had gone wrong. His “tale” seemed to be that he wanted to make money quick. He had had what he called a “brainwave”. At twenty he had become attached to a second-hand-car firm, which promptly failed.

“Why did it fail?”

“It isn’t everyone who is fortunate enough to have capital, you know.”

Then he had become a clerk in an insurance office in Preston.

“You may be thinking I’ve had too many posts. I was always looking for the right one.”

He had got married (“I’m a great believer in taking on one’s responsibilities early”). Unfit for military service. Both children born during the war.

Another brainwave, making radio sets.

“My ship didn’t come home that time either,” said Mr Pateman.

“What happened?”

“Differences of opinion.” He swept his arm. “You know what it is, when the people in command don’t give a man his head.”

“What would you have done if they had given you your head?”

“They never intended to. They asked me there on false pretences. My schemes never got beyond the blueprint stage.”

A new venture — this time in patent medicines. It looked as though all was well.

“Then we met a very cold wind. And I don’t want to accuse anyone, but my partner came better than I did out of the financial settlement.”

By that time, in his early forties, he had lived in a dozen towns and never made more, I guessed, than a few hundred a year. He descended further, and for eighteen months was trying to sell vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He brought it out quite honestly, but as though with stupefaction that this should have happened to him. Then — what he admitted, with a superior smile, had seemed like a piece of luck. An acquaintance from his radio days had introduced him to his present firm. He had moved to the town, and this house, five years before. It was his longest continuous job since his young manhood.

“And I’m still getting less than my own daughter. It isn’t right. It can’t be right.”

I should have liked to avoid what was coming. Playing out time, I asked if his firm knew that he was considering another move. He gave a lofty nod.

“Are they prepared to recommend you?”

“They certainly are. I have a letter over there. Would you like to read it?”

It did not matter, I said. Mr Pateman gave me a knowing smile.

“Yes, I should expect you to read between the lines.”

I was saying something distracting, meaningless, but he was fixing me with his stare: “I want an opportunity. That’s all I’m asking for.”

I said, slowly: “I don’t know what advice I can possibly give you—”

“I wasn’t asking for advice, sir. I was asking for an opportunity.”

Even after that higgledy-piggledy life, he was undefeated. It was easy to imagine him at the doors of big houses, talking of his vacuum cleaners, impassively, imperviously, not down and out because he was certain the future must come right.

Nevertheless, I was thinking of old colleagues of mine considering him for jobs. Considering people for jobs had to be a heartless business. No man in his senses could think Mr Pateman a good risk. They mightn’t mind, or even be interested in, his odder aspects. But he carried so many signs that the least suspicious would notice — he had been restless, he had quarrelled with every boss, he had been unrealistically on the make.

Still, nowadays there was a job for anyone who could read and write. Mr Pateman was, in the mechanical sense, far from stupid. He had a good deal of energy. At his age, he would not get a better job, certainly not one much better. He might get a different one.

He was sitting with his hands on his knees, his head back, a smile as it were of approbation on his lips. He did not appear in the least uneasy that I should not find an answer. The slack fire smoked: the draught blew across the room: among the fumes I picked out the antiseptic smell which hung about him as though he had just come from hospital.

“Well, Mr Pateman,” I said. “I mustn’t raise false hopes.” I went on to say that I was out of the official life for good and all. He gazed at me with confident disbelief: to him, that was simply part of my make-believe. There were two places he might try. He could possibly get fitted up in another radio firm: I could give him the name of a personnel officer.

“Once bitten, twice shy, thank you, sir,” said Mr Pateman.

Alternatively, he might contemplate working in a government office as a temporary clerk. The pay would be a little better: the work, I warned him, would be extremely monotonous: I could tell him how to apply at the local employment exchange.

“I don’t believe in employment exchanges. I believe in going somewhere where one has contacts at the top.”

He seemed — had it been true before he met me? — to have dreamed up his own fantasy. He seemed to think that I should say one simple word to my old colleagues. I tried to explain to him that the machine did not work that way. If the Ministry of Labour took him on, they would send him wherever clerks were needed. He could tell them that he had a preference, but there was no guarantee that he would get what he wanted.

Anyone who had been asked for such a favour had to get used to the sight of disappointment — and to the different ways men took it. There were a few who, like Mr Pateman now, began to threaten.

“I must say, I was hoping for something more constructive from you,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

“I don’t like being led up the garden path.” His eyes were fixed on mine. “I was given to understand that you weren’t as hidebound as some of them.”

I said nothing.

“I shall have to consider my course of action.” He was speaking with dignity. Then he said: “I expect that you’re doing your best. You must be a busy man.”

I got up, went into the back kitchen, and shook hands with his wife. She could have overheard us throughout: she looked up at me with something like understanding.

Mr Pateman took me down to the passage (the record player was still sounding from the front room), and, at the door, threw out his hand in a stately goodbye.

5: Time and a Friend

OWING to the single-mindedness of Mr Pateman, I was a few minutes late for my appointment with George Passant. I arrived in the lounge of the public house where we had first drunk together when I was eighteen, nearly forty years before: the room was almost empty, for the pub was no longer fashionable at night and George himself no longer used it, except for these ritual meetings with me.

There, by the side of what used to be a coal fire and was now blocked up, he sat. He gave me a burst of greeting, a monosyllabic shout.

As I grew older, and met friends whom I had known for most of my lifetime, I often thought that I didn’t see them clearly — or rather, that I saw them with a kind of double vision, as though there were two photographs not accurately superposed. Underneath, there was not only a memory of themselves when young, but the physical presence: that lingered in one’s sight, it was never quite ripped away, one still saw them — through the intermittence of time passing — with one’s own youthful eyes. And also one saw them as they were now, in the present moment, as one was oneself.

Nowadays I met George three or four times a year, and this double vision was still working. I could still — not often, but in sharp moments — see the young man who had befriended me, set me going: whose face had been full of anger and hope, and who had walked with me through the streets outside on nights of triumph, his voice rebounding from the darkened houses.

But, more than in any other friend, the present was here too. There he sat in the pub. His face was in front of me, greeting me with formal welcome. It was the face of an old, sick man.

Not that he was unhappy. On the contrary, he had been happier than most men all his life, and had stayed so. Not that he behaved as though he were ill. On the contrary, he behaved as though he were immortal. If I had been studying him for the first time, I should have been doubtful about guessing his age. His fair hair was still thick, and had whitened only over his ears, though it was wild and disarranged, for his whole appearance was dilapidated. His face was lined, but almost at random, so that he had no look of mature age. His mouth often fell open, and his eyes became unfocused.

He was actually sixty-three. I had tried to get him to discuss his health, but he turned vague, sometimes, it seemed to me, with a deliberate cunning. He spoke casually about his blood pressure and some pills he had to take. He admitted that his doctor, whose name he wouldn’t tell me, had put him on a diet. From what I noticed, he didn’t even pretend to keep to it. He still ate gargantuan meals, somehow proud of his self-indulgence, topping off — in a fashion which once had been comic but was now frightening — a meal larger than most of us ate in two days with four or five cream cakes. He drank as much, or more, than ever. He had always been heavy, but now was fat from his upper chest down to his groin. He must have weighed fifteen stone.

None of that had interfered with his desire for women. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that, as he grew old, he wanted younger girls: but, with the same elderly cunning with which he dissimulated his health, he had long ago concealed those details from me. I knew that his firm of solicitors had pensioned him off a couple of years before. Once again, he was vague in telling me the reasons. It might have been that his concentration had gone, as his body deteriorated. It might have been that what he called his “private life”, that underground group activity by which he had once started out to emancipate us all, had become notorious. And yet, in this middle-sized town, none of the members of the Court that morning would have been likely even to have heard his name.

He kept his strange diffident sweetness. When he forced himself, his mind became precise. He liked seeing me. Yet, I had to admit it (it was an admission that for years I had shut out), he had become quite remote. Whenever we met, he asked the same set of hearty mechanical questions, as he did that night. How was Margaret? Well, I said. Splendid, said George. Was I writing? Yes, I said. Splendid, said George. How was Charles? Getting on fine, I said. Here the formula took a different course. “I’m not concerned about his academic prospects. I take those for granted,” said George. “I’m asking you about his health.”

“He’s very tough,” I said.

“I hope you’re certain about that,” said George, as though he were a family doctor or the best-qualified censor of physical self-discipline.

“He’s fine.”

“Well, that’s slightly reassuring,” said George. “It’s his health that I want to be convinced about, that’s the important thing.”

That conversation, in very much the same words, took place each time we met. It expressed a kind of formalised affection. But it had set in a groove something like ten years before. So far as there was meaning in the questions about Charles, they referred to the fact that he had been seriously ill in infancy. Since then he had been as healthy as a boy could be: but George, who wanted to show his interest, couldn’t find an interest in anything that had happened to him since.

“Drink up!” cried George. I had another pint of beer, which, except with him, I never drank.

I should have liked (I had enough nostalgia for that) to settle down to talk. I mentioned my singular experience with Mr Pateman. George, happy with some internal reverie, gave a loud but inattentive laugh. I said that I had, for a moment or two, come across his niece. At that he showed some response, as though breaking through the daydream which submerged him.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been able to see much of my family,” he said.

I understood his language too well to ask why not. There were esoteric reasons manifest to him, though to no one else. In fact, he had had three sisters: all had married, and one, Cora’s mother, was now dead. Another one was living in London, and the third stayed in the town. All three of them had borne nothing but daughters; I had met none of George’s nieces until that afternoon, and he himself seldom referred to them.

“This one (Cora) seems to be pretty bright,” he said. “She even tagged along with some of my people not so long ago—”

“My people” were the successors to the group of which, in my time, he had been the leader and inspirer. All the years since he had been surrounded by young men and women, his own self-perpetuating underground.

“What happened?”

“Oh, somehow she seemed to lose touch.” He went on: “I’ve never enquired into the lives of any of my family. And I’ve never told them anything about my own.”

He said that with the simplicity of Einstein stating that “puritanical reticence” was necessary for a searcher after truth.

I started to speak about a concern of mine. After all, he was my oldest friend, and it had been a jagged year for me, as my father didn’t know but my young son did — and as George had barely noticed. When I got out of public life, soon after Roger Quaife’s defeat, I had expected to get out of controversy also. But it hadn’t happened like that. Some of the enmity had followed me, and had got tangled up with my literary affairs. A few months before, I had been accused, in somewhat lurid circumstances, of plagiarism. This had made the news, and kept recurring. As I told George, understating the whole business, if you live in public at all, you have to take what’s coming: but, though I could imagine almost any other kind of accusation against me having some sort of basis, this one hadn’t. That, however, didn’t make it any more pleasant.

My brand of sarcasm washed over him.

“I remember seeing something or other in the papers,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t take part. Who’s going to listen to a retired solicitor’s clerk? Anyway, as you say, you’ve nothing to complain about.”

That was not what I had really said: he had forgotten my tone of voice. “If anyone’s got anything to complain about,” said George, warming up, “I have. Do you realise that I’ve spent forty-two years in this wretched town, and they’ve kept me out of everything? They’ve seen to it that I’ve never had a responsible position in my whole life. They’ve put a foot across my path ever since I was a boy. And at the end, if you please, they don’t say as much as thank you and they give me a bit more than they need just to stop feeling ashamed of themselves.”

In the first place “they” meant his old firm of solicitors. But “they” also meant all the kinds of authority he had struggled against, detected conspiracies among, found incomprehensible and yet omnipotent, since he was a boy. All the authority in the country. Or in life, as far as that went. It sounded like persecution mania, and he had always had a share of it. Yet, like many people with persecution mania, he had something to feel persecuted about. Perhaps the one allured the other? Which came first? He was the cleverest man whom I had seen, in functional terms, so completely wasted. But now I had seen more, I speculated on the kind of skill, or whether there was any, which would have been needed not to waste him — or not to let him waste himself.

“I never got anything, did I?” he said, with a gentle puzzled smile.

“No, you didn’t.”

“I suppose I didn’t want it very much.” Just for an instant, all the paraphernalia of his temperament was thrown aside, and that dart of candour shot out.

“Anyway,” he shouted, in a great voice, not the voice of a sick man, “they won. They won. Let’s have another drink on it.”

He was happy and resigned. Did he realise — probably not, he was too happy to go in for irony — that, in a different sense, it was he who had won? All those passionate arguments for freedom — which meant sexual freedom. The young George in this town, poor, unknown, feeling himself outside society, raising the great voice I had just heard. “Freedom from their damned homes, and their damned parents, and their damned lives.” Well, he had won: or rather, all those like him, all the forces they spoke for (since he was, as someone had said during one of his ordeals, a “child of his time”) had won. How completely, one could not escape at the Court that morning. The freedom which George had once dreamed about had duly happened: and, now it had happened, he took it for granted. He didn’t cherish it as a victory. He just assumed that the world was better than it used to be.

I had expected that we should have a meal together — but George was looking at his watch.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’m rather pressed tonight.”

He had the air, which one sometimes saw in businessmen or politicians, of faint estrangement from those not regulated by a timetable.

I did not ask where he was going. I said I should attend the Court in June, and that we could meet as usual. Splendid, said George. Splendid, he repeated, with immense heartiness. He got up to leave me. As he went to the door, I noticed that he was making one, though only one, concession to his physical state: he was walking with abnormal slowness. It was deliberate, but from the back he looked like an old man.

When I myself left the pub, I didn’t stroll through the streets, as I often liked doing. That meeting with George had had an effect on me which I didn’t understand, or perhaps didn’t want to: it hadn’t precisely saddened me, but I didn’t want my memory to be played on. It was better to be with people whom I hadn’t known for long, to be back in the here-and-now. So I returned to the Residence: this time the drawing-room lights, seen from the drive, were welcoming. The sight of Vicky was welcoming too. They had had an early dinner, she said, and her father had gone off to his manuscripts. She said: “When did you eat last?”

Not since breakfast, I replied. She clucked, and said that I was impossible. Soon I was sitting in front of the fire with a plate of sandwiches. Vicky curled up on the rug. I was tired, but not unpleasantly so, just enough to realise that I had had a long day. It was all familiar and comfortable, the past pushed away, no menace left.

Vicky wouldn’t talk, or let me, until I had eaten. Then she said that her father had told her about the Court proceedings. She knew the result, and she was relieved: anyway, we had time to work in: perversely, she was enough relieved to be irritated with me.

“You two (she meant her father and me) had an up-and-a-downer, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s his account, anyway.”

I told her that I thought I deserved a bit of praise. She said: “I must say, I should like to knock your heads together.”

It appeared that Arnold Shaw had told her of a violent argument, in which he had prevailed. Actually, she was pleased. Pleased because she was protective about her father and trusted me. She was hopeful about the next moves. I said that the academics were being sensible, and I myself would try to involve Francis Getliffe.

She was sitting on her heels, her hair shining and her face tinted in the firelight.

“Bless you,” she said.

I had not mentioned Leonard Getliffe’s name, but only his father’s. That was enough, though, to set her thoughts going, as if I had touched a trigger and released uncontrollable forces. Her expression was softened; when she spoke her voice was strong, but had lost the touch of bossiness, the doctor’s edge.

Could she make a nuisance of herself again? she said. She knew that I understood: questions about Pat had formed themselves. My first impulse, before she had said a word, was of pity for Leonard Getliffe.

Though I knew, and she knew that I knew, she started off by seeming unusually theoretical. Was a marriage, all other things being good, likely to be affected if the wife was earning the livelihood? Even for her, the most direct of young women, it was a pleasure to go through a minuet, to produce a problem in the abstract, or as though she were seeking advice on behalf of a remote acquaintance. I gave a banal answer, that sometimes I had known it work, sometimes not. In my own first marriage, I added, my wife had contributed half the money: and, though it had been unhappy, it had not been any more unhappy, perhaps less, because of that. She hadn’t heard of my first marriage: and after what I had just said, she still really hadn’t heard. She said: “So you’re not against it?”

I said, once more banal, that any general answer had no meaning. Then I asked: “Are you going to get married then?”

“I hope so.”

I had another impulse, this time of concern for her. She was speaking with certainty. I wished that she was more superstitious, or that she had some insurance against the future.

“You see,” said Vicky, “I can earn a living, though it won’t be a very grand living, while we see if he can make a go of it. Is that a good idea?”

“Isn’t he very young—” I began carefully, but she interrupted me.

“There is a snag, of course. You can’t do a medical job with young children around. I’m too wrapped up in him to think about children now. You know how it is, I can’t believe that I shall ever want anything but him. I have to tell myself of course I shall.” She gave a self-deprecating smile. “I’m just the same as everybody else, aren’t I? I expect I shall turn into a pretty doting mother.”

“I expect you will,” I said. I was easier when she got down from the heights.

“If we wanted to start a family in three or four years’ time, and we oughtn’t to leave it much later, because I shall be getting on for thirty, then he might not be able to keep us, might he?”

Practical plans. Delectable practical plans. As delectable as being on the heights, sometimes more so.

“However good he is,” I said, “it’s hard to break through at his game—”

“I know,” she said. “Well, what else can he do on the side?” I said it would be difficult for his father to allow him anything. Martin had a daughter still at school, and, apart from his Cambridge salary, not a penny. As for myself–

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly let you give us money.”

Her young man quite possibly could, I thought. I nearly said it: but she, like George in the pub an hour or two before, would not have recognised my tone of voice.

In any case, there was something that I ought to say.

“Look, Vicky,” I began, as casually as I could, hesitating between leaving her quite unwarned and throwing even the faintest shade upon her joy, “I told you a minute ago, he is a very young man, isn’t he?”

“Do you know, I don’t feel that.”

“Your character’s formed,” I went on. “You’re as grown-up as you’ll ever be.” (I wasn’t convinced of that, but it was a way to talk of Pat.) “I’m not so sure that’s true of him, you know.”

She was looking at me without apprehension, without a blink.

“I mean,” I said, “parts of people’s character grow up at different rates. Perhaps that’s specially so for men. In some ways Pat’s mature. But I’m not certain that he is in all. I’m not certain that he’s capable of knowing exactly what he wants for his whole life. He may be too young for that.”

She smiled.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

She smiled at me affectionately, but like someone in the know, with a piece of information the source of which cannot be revealed.

“He’s a very strong character,” she said.

All my hesitation had been unnecessary. I hadn’t hurt her. She was no less fond of me, and also no less joyous. She was totally unaffected. She was confident — but that was too weak a word, for this was the confidence of every cell in her body — that she knew him as I could never do, and that she was right.

We did not say much more about Pat that night. Some time afterwards, while we were still sitting by the fire, Arnold Shaw came in, rubbing his hands.

“Couple of hours’ good work,” he announced. “Which is more than most of my colleagues will do this term.”

With the utmost friendliness and good nature, he asked me if I had spent a tolerable afternoon, and invited me to have a nightcap. Vicky was watching us both with a blank expression. She had heard him talk of a bitter quarrel: if I knew Arnold Shaw’s temper, he had denounced me as every kind of a bad man: here he was, convivial, and treating me as an old friend. She admired him for being a museum specimen of a sea green incorruptible (in that she was her father’s daughter): here he was, looking not incorruptible but matey and malicious, and certainly not sea green. Here we both were, drinking our nightcaps, as though we wanted no one else’s company. Yet she didn’t for an instant doubt that he would never budge an inch, and that I too would stick it out. Here we were, exchanging sharp-tongued gossip. It struck her as part of a masculine conspiracy which she could not completely comprehend.

When Arnold Shaw was disposed to think of a second nightcap, she roused herself and, daughter-like, doctor-like, said that it was time for bed.

6: Describing a Triangle

BACK in our flat, the sunlight slanting down over the Hyde Park trees, my wife was listening to me. I had been telling her about the past two days: we had our own shorthand, she knew where I had been amused and where I was pretending to be amused.

“It’s a good job you’ve got some stamina, isn’t it?” she said.

It sounded detached; it couldn’t have been less so. She was happy because I was well and not resigned, any more than she was herself. She had always looked younger than her age, and did so still. Her skin remained as fine as Vicky Shaw’s. The only open signs of middle age were the streaks of grey above her temples. I had suggested that, since she looked in all other respects so young, she might as well have them tinted. She had been taken aback, for that was the kind of intervention which she didn’t expect from me. But she said no: it was the one trivial thing she had refused me. She wore those streaks like insignia.

In some ways she had changed during our marriage: or rather, parts of her temperament had thrust themselves through, in a fashion that to me was a surprise and not a surprise, part of the Japanese flower of marriage. To others, even to friends as perceptive as Charles March or my brother, she had seemed overdelicate, or something like austere. It was the opposite of the truth. Once she had dressed very simply, but now she spent money and was smart. It might have seemed that she had become vainer and more self-regarding. Actually, she had become more humble. She didn’t mind revealing herself, not as what she had once thought suitable, but as she really was: and if what she revealed was self-contradictory, well then (in this aspect true to her high-minded intellectual ancestors, from whom in all else she had parted) she didn’t give a damn.

Earlier, she used to think that I enjoyed “the world” too much. Now she enjoyed it more than I did. At the same time, in the midst of happiness, she wanted something else. She had thrown away the web of personal relations, the aesthetic credo, in which and by which her father, whom she loved, had lived his life. That was too thin for her: and as for the stoical dutifulness of many of my political or scientific friends, she could admire it, but it wasn’t enough. She would have liked to be a religious believer: she couldn’t make herself. It wasn’t a deep wound, as it had been for Roy Calvert, for she was stronger-spirited, but she knew what it was — as perhaps all deep-natured people know it — to be happy, to count her blessings, and, in the midst of content, to feel morally restless, to feel that there must be another purpose to this life.

With Margaret, too clear-sighted to fabricate a purpose, this gave an extra edge to her responsibilities. As a young woman she had been responsible, with a conscience greater than mine: now she was almost superstitiously so. Her father, who had been ill for years — she wouldn’t go out at night without leaving a telephone number. Her son by her first marriage. Charles and me at home. Her sister. Margaret tried to disguise it, because she knew her own obsessions: but if she had believed in prayer, she would have prayed for many people every night.

So she took it for granted that I ought to do my best for Arnold Shaw and Vicky. She took it for granted that I should be as long-suffering as she could be — for after the years together some of my behaviour had shaded into hers, and hers into mine. Further, she was herself involved. She seemed controlled, whereas I was easy and let my emotions flow, so that people were deceived: her loves and hates had always been violent, and below the surface they were not damped down. She was exhibiting one of them now, against my nephew Pat. She thought he was a waster. She was sorry for any woman who married him. Yet, although she scarcely knew Vicky, she believed me when I said that she was totally committed.

There wasn’t much one could do in others’ lives: that was a lesson I had taught her. But there was no excuse for not doing the little that one could: that was a lesson she had taught me. At the least, I could put in a word for Arnold Shaw. It would be better for both of them if he kept his job. It was worth going to Cambridge, just to get Francis Getliffe’s support, Margaret agreed. We didn’t like being parted, but she couldn’t come, while her father was so ill: for some time past she had been tied to London, and consequently in the last twelve months I had spent only six or seven nights away from home.

This time I need not stay in Cambridge more than one night — and that I could put off until Charles went back to school. There were a few days left of his holidays, and he was still young enough to enjoy going out with Margaret and me to dinner and the theatre, the pleasant, safeguarded London evenings.

Those days passed, and I was in a taxi, driving out along the Backs to the Getliffes’ house, within a week of my visit to the Court. So that, by chance, I had completed the triangle of the three towns that I knew best — in fact, the only three towns in England that I had ever lived in for long. The sky was lucid, there was a cold wind blowing, the blossom was heavy white on the trees: it was late afternoon in April, the time of day and year that I used to walk away from Fenner’s. This was the “pretty England” with which I had baited my son, the prettiest of pretty England. Nowadays when I saw Cambridge, I saw it like a visitor, and thought how beautiful it was. And yet, when I lived there, I seemed scarcely to have noticed it. It had been a bad time for me, my hopes had come to nothing, I was living (and this had been true of me until I was middle-aged) as though I were in a station waiting-room: somehow a train would come, taking me somewhere, anywhere, letting my hopes flare up again. But that wasn’t what I remarked first about Cambridge: instead, it was the distractions, or even the comforts, that I had found. One of the most robust of men, who was given to melancholy, told a fellow sufferer to light bright fires. Well, I had had enough to be melancholy about, but what I remembered were the bright fires. There had been times when I didn’t know what was to become of me: yet it had been a consolation (and this was the memory, unless I dug deeper against my will) to call on old Arthur Brown, drink a glass of wine, and get going on another move in college politics. Even if I had been content, I should nevertheless, I was sure, have got some interest out of that powerplay. I enjoyed watching personal struggles, big and small, and I couldn’t have found a better training ground. But, all that admitted, if I had been content, I shouldn’t have become so passionately absorbed in college politics. They were my refuge from the cold outside.

The Getliffes’ drawing-room was, as usual, untidy and welcoming: perhaps a shade more untidy than it used to be, since now they had half-a-dozen grandchildren. It had been welcoming in the past, even when my relations with Francis had been strained, once when we were ranged on different sides, and again more recently when, led by Quaife, we had been on the same side and lost. It had been welcoming even when he was torn by ambition, when his research was going wrong or his public campaigns had wrecked his nerves. One could see the traces of those tensions in his face to this day, the lines, the folds of sepia flesh under his eyes. But the tensions had themselves all gone. Of my close friends, he had had the greatest and the most deserved success. Quite late in life, he had done scientific work with which he was satisfied. That was his prime reward. The honours had flowed in: he was no hypocrite, and he liked those too. There had never been anything puritanical about his radicalism. On a question of principle, he had not made a single concession: his integrity was absolute: but, if orthodoxy chose to catch up with him, well, then he was ready to enjoy sitting in the House of Lords.

The stiffness, the touch of formality which looked like pride and which had developed during the worst of his struggles, had almost vanished. Sometimes in public it could recur. I had recently heard some smart young debunker pass a verdict on him. The young man had met him precisely once, but felt morally obliged to dispose of an eminent figure. “He’s the hell of a prima donna, of course, but he does know how to land the jobs.” I hadn’t been infuriated so much as stupefied. Each of us really is alone, I thought. And now I was greeting my old friend and his wife, in their own home, in the happiest marriage I had ever seen.

I embraced Katherine. She had, with unusual self-discipline, been dieting recently and had lost a stone or two: but she remained a matriarch. When Francis was surrounded by the three married children and assorted grandsons and granddaughters, he became a patriarch. Yet now he and Katherine were smiling at each other with — there was no need to diminish or qualify the word — love. They had been married for well over thirty years: it had been a lively active marriage, the support — more than support, the inner validity in all his troubles. They had gone on loving each other, and now, when the troubles were over, they did so still.

It would have been easy, one would have expected, to envy Francis. He had had so much. And yet, curiously enough, he had not attracted a great deal of envy. Nothing like as much as our old colleague, Walter Luke: not as much as I had at times myself. What makes a character envy-repellent? On the whole, the people I had known who attracted the least envy were cold, shut in, mildly paranoid. But none of that was true of Francis, who was — at least in intimacy — both kind and warm. So was she, and they were showing it that evening.

Though Katherine complained that she hated entertaining, and had given that as a reason why Francis should not become Master of the college (the hidden reason was that he shrank from the in-fighting), this house had, with the years, taken on a marked resemblance to the ground floor of an American hotel. One son and one daughter lived in Cambridge; and they, their children, their friends, their friends’ children, paid visits as unpredictable as those in a nineteenth-century Russian country house. In the midst of the casual family hubbub, the Getliffes took care of others: they knew that Margaret would want news of her son Maurice, and so, along with a party of young people, some of whom I couldn’t identify but who all called Francis by his Christian name, he had been brought in for a pre-dinner drink. By one of the sardonic tricks of chance, it was just that same considerate kindness which had brought ill-luck to their eldest son: for, on a similar occasion, when Leonard first brought Vicky Shaw to see them, they had invited my nephew Pat: and it was in this drawing-room that she had fallen in love.

In a corner of the room, I was talking to Maurice about his work.

“I wish I were brighter,” he said with his beautiful innocent smile, as he had said to me before, since for years Margaret and I had had to watch him struggle over one scholastic hurdle, then another. He bore no malice, even though the rest of us found these hurdles non-existent. He was fond of his step-brother, who was a born competitor. Sometimes I couldn’t help thinking — it was a rare thought for me — that he was naturally good. He had been a beautiful child, and now was a good-looking young man. I should have guessed, when I first saw him as an infant, that by now he would appear indrawn: but that had proved dead wrong. He had turned out good-looking in an unusual fashion, as though the world hadn’t touched him: fair, unshadowed, with wide-orbited idealist’s eyes. Yet the world probably had touched him, for those were the kind of looks that at school had brought him plenty of attention. And he would get the same from women soon, I thought. He gave affection very easily: he might be innocent, but he accepted all that happened round him. He liked making people happy.

Margaret was devoted to him. Partly with the special devotion, and remorse, that one feels for the child of a broken marriage: partly because there was something of her own spirit in him. But none of her cleverness, nor of his father’s.

I was trying to discover how things were going. He was in his first year. He hoped to become a doctor, like his father. Psychologically, that would be a good choice for him. He wanted to look after others: given the faith which he, like Margaret, didn’t find, he would have made a priest.

The trouble was, the college had told us that he was unlikely to get through the Mays (the Cambridge first year examinations). I was inquiring what he thought, and which subjects were the worst.

“I’m afraid I’m pretty dense,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. I let some impatience show. Often I felt that, just as he accepted everything else, he accepted his own incompetence.

“You believe I’m doing it on purpose, don’t you?” He was teasing me. He and I had always been on friendly terms. He wasn’t in the least frightened of me: nor, so far as I had ever seen, of anyone else. He had his own kind of insight.

At last the Getliffes and I were left alone. For once there was no one else present when we went into dinner. Francis, who had seen me spend a long time with Maurice, began talking about him.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “he isn’t going to make it.”

“He’s very nice,” said Katherine.

“He’s not even stupid,” said Francis. “I know, it must be a worry for you both.”

The two of them were not only loving parents, they took on the duties of parents at one remove. It seemed like a way of giving thanks for their own good fortune. The problems of friends’ children — not only those of intimate friends like us — they spent their time upon. About Maurice, Francis had had interviews with his tutor and supervisors. Francis and Katherine hadn’t known the inside of a broken marriage: but their sympathy was sharp, they could feel for both Margaret and me; in different senses, it made us more vulnerable through Maurice.

They were sympathetic, but also practical. With a creased, unsentimental smile, Francis said that, come hell, come high water, we had to get the young man through some sort of course. Damn it, he had to earn a living. His supervisors said he didn’t seem to possess any approach to a memory. He couldn’t memorise anything. “I should have thought,” said Francis, “that’s going to make medicine pretty well impossible. The anatomy they learn is sheer unscientific nonsense, but still they’ve got to learn it.”

He gave me some consolatory examples to tell Margaret, of intelligent people who had nothing like a normal memory, and there we had to leave it, Katherine reluctantly, for she, like all her relatives I had once known so well, couldn’t resist coming back to test an aching tooth.

The dinner was good. Francis, who had been so gaunt and quixotic right into his mid-fifties, was at last beginning to put on a little weight. I was comfortable with them both, and more than that. But I should have to leave in an hour or two, for I was staying with my brother. It was time to discharge what I had come for.

“Francis,” I said, “I wonder if you can give a hand about old Arnold Shaw.”

He had heard most of the immediate story — though neither he nor Katherine were above enquiring about the details of the students’ goings on. I told him that the present issue was effectively settled: it looked as though two or three of the students would be placed elsewhere: and then Shaw would get a confirmatory vote and, in form, a victory. But, I said, it might be an expensive victory. He had had plenty of enemies before. Now there would be more. There might come a point, not too far off, when his position became untenable. Could Francis use his influence as Chancellor? Could he talk to the academics in private? And to some of the dignitaries? After all, he could speak with real authority. He just had to tell them that, in spite of his faults, Shaw was doing a good job.

Francis had been listening as carefully as he used to listen in Whitehall. He passed the decanter round to me, and watched me fill my glass. He said: “I don’t think I can tell them that.”

“Why not?”

“Quite simply, I don’t believe he is.”

“Oh come,” I said. Incautiously, I hadn’t been prepared for this. “Look, I know he’s an awkward customer, I have to stand more of it than you do, but after all he has put the place on the map.”

“I don’t believe,” said Francis, “that a man ought to be head of a university if he gets detested by nearly all the students and most of the staff.”

It was years since I had seen him in action: I had half-forgotten how decisive he could be.

“Remember,” I said, “that he’s brought in the staff — at least, he’s brought in all of them that are any good.”

“He is a good picker.” Francis was irritatingly fair. “Yes, that’s been his contribution. But now he’s got them, he can’t get on with them. It’s a pity, but the place will be at sixes and sevens so long as he’s there.”

He added: “It’s a pity, but he’s cut his own throat.”

“He’s got some human quality,” I said.

Katherine broke in: “You said that before. About the other one. And we said his wife was appalling. So she was, but I suppose she was attached to him in her own fashion. When he died, it was just before Penelope had her second baby, she stayed with the coffin and they had to pull her away from the grave.”

For the moment, I had lost track. Who was she talking about?

“And then she died within three months, though no one troubled to know about her and so no one knew what was the matter. As for Walter Luke, it didn’t do him any harm. He went to Barford and got into the Royal Society and nearly got killed—”

“No connection,” Francis smiled at her, though he looked as mystified as I was.

“And finished up perfectly well and got decorated and had another child.”

She ended in triumph: “You did make a frightful ass of yourself that time, Lewis.”

That was a phrase her father used to brandish. I had been quite bemused, but now I had it. She was indulging, as she did more often, in a feat of total recall, just as her father used to. What she had been saying referred to an argument about the Mastership in that house, no less than twenty-six years before. It was the candidate I had wanted, Jago, who had died, and his wife after him — but that was not twenty-six years before, only two. When Katherine got going she existed, just as her father had, in a timeless continuum when the present moment, the three of us there at dinner, was just as real, no more, no less, than the flux of memory.

Francis was slower than I to take the reference. Then he gave her a loving grin, and said to me: “She’s right, you know. You did make an ass of yourself that time.”

It was true. It had been bad judgment. But, though my candidate had lost, though it was so long ago, Katherine and Francis often liked to remind me of it.

“Two can play at that game,” I began, ready to try rougher tactics, but in fact Katherine’s performance had taken the sting from the quarrel, and also, realistically, I knew that Francis, once he had taken up his stance, would be as hard to move as Arnold Shaw himself. So when he said that I was now making the same mistake, that I got more interested in people than in the job they had to do, I let it go. It wasn’t without justice, after all. And it wasn’t without justice that he spoke of Arnold Shaw. Something would have to be done for him, if and when he resigned: the university would give him an honorary degree: he could be found a research appointment to help out his pension. That would be better than nothing, I said. Then I mentioned that I had met Leonard, and the three of us were at one again.

“I’m getting just a little tired,” said Francis, “of people telling me that as a scientist he is an order of magnitude better than I am.” But he said it with the special pride of a father who enjoys his son being praised at his own expense. To give an appearance of stern impartiality, as of one who isn’t going to see his family receive more than their due, he said that their second son, Lionel, wasn’t in the same class. “I don’t think he’s any better than I am,” said Francis judiciously. “He ought to get into the Royal before he’s finished, though.”

I said that they were abnormally lucky: but still, the genes on both sides were pretty good. Francis said, not all that good. His father had been a moderately competent barrister at the Parliamentary Bar. Katherine said: “There’s not been a single March who’s ever produced an original idea in his life. Except, perhaps, my great-uncle Benjamin, who tried to persuade the Rothschilds not to put down the money for the Suez canal.”

Anyway, said Francis, who wanted to talk more of Leonard, a talent like his must be a pure sport. High level of ability, yes, lots of families had that — but the real stars, they might come from anywhere, they were just a gift of fate. “It must be wonderful,” he said, half-wistfully, “to have his sort of power.”

They were so proud of him, as I should have been, or any sentient parent. They were pleased that he was as high-principled as they were: he had recently defied criticism and appointed Donald Howard, who had once been a fellow of the college, to his staff, just because he had been badly treated — although Leonard didn’t even like the man. But, despite their close family life, they seemed to know little or nothing of his unhappiness over Vicky. “It’s high time he got married,” said Katherine, as though that were his only blemish, an inexplicable piece of wilfulness. They wondered what sort of children he would have.

After Francis had driven me to the college gate, I walked through the courts to the Senior Tutor’s house. I had walked that same way often enough when Jago was Senior Tutor. Now I was accustomed to it again, since my brother, after Arthur Brown’s term, got the succession. Lights were shining, young men’s voices resounded: the smell of wistaria was faint on the cool air: it brought back, not a sharp memory, but a sense that there was something I knew but had (like a name on the tip of the tongue) temporarily forgotten.

My brother’s study was lit up, curtains undrawn, and there he and Irene were waiting for me. She fussed round, yelping cheerfully: Martin sat by the fireside in his slippers, sharp-eyed, fraternal, suspecting that there was some meaning in this visit.

Another home, another marriage. A settled marriage, but one which had arrived there by a different route from the Getliffes’. She had been a reckless, amorous young woman: in their first years she had had lovers, had cost him humiliation and, because he had married for love, much misery. But he was the stronger of the two. It was his will which had worn her down. It was possible — I was not certain — that as she grew to depend upon him utterly, she in her turn had been through some misery. I was not certain, because, though he trusted me more than anyone else and occasionally asked me to store away some documents, he preserved a kind of whiggish decorum. If there had been love affairs, they had been kept hidden. Anyway, their marriage had been settled for a long time past, and Martin’s anxiety had its roots in another place.

On my way down to Cambridge, I hadn’t been confident that I should get him to talk. As soon as I entered his study we were easy together, with the ease of habit, and something stronger too. But he had been controlled and secretive all his life, and in middle age he was letting secretiveness possess him. I still didn’t know whether I should get an answer, or even be able to talk at all.

By accident, or perhaps not entirely by accident, for she understood him well, it was Irene who gave me the chance.

We had begun by gossiping. Nowadays the college changed more rapidly than it used to in my time. There were twice as many fellows, they came and went. Many of my old acquaintances were dead. Of those who had voted in the 1937 election, only Arthur Brown, Francis and Nightingale were still fellows. Some I had known since hadn’t stayed for long. One who hadn’t stayed — it was he that Irene was gossiping about — was a man called Lester Ince. He had recently run off with an American woman: an American woman, so it turned out, of enormous wealth. They had each got divorces and then married. The present rumour was that they were looking round for a historic country house.

“A very suitable end for an angry young man,” said Martin, with a tart smile. I was amused. I had a soft spot for Lester Ince. It was true that, since he had started his academic career by being remarkably rude, he had gained a reputation for holding advanced opinions. This had infuriated both Francis and Martin, who believed in codes of manners, and who had also remained seriously radical and had each paid a certain price.

“He’s quite a good chap,” I said.

“He hasn’t got the political intelligence of a newt,” said Martin.

“He’s really very amiable,” I said.

“If it hadn’t been for that damned fool,” Martin was not placated, “we shouldn’t have been in this intolerable mess.”

That also was true. Before Crawford, the last Master, retired, it had been assumed that Francis Getliffe would stand and get the job. That would presumably have happened — but Francis had suddenly said no. The college had dissolved into a collective hubbub. Lester Ince had trumpeted that what they needed was an independent man. The independent man was G S Clark. Half the college saw the beauty of the idea: G S Clark was an obsessed reactionary in all senses, but that didn’t matter. Martin, who was an accomplished college politician, did his best for Arthur Brown, but the Clark faction won by a couple of votes. It had been one of the bitter elections.

“It’s got to the point,” Martin was saying, “that when the Master puts his name down to dine, half-a-dozen people take theirs off.”

“What about you?”

“As a rule,” said Martin, without expression, “I dine at home.”

That had its own eloquence. He was both patient and polite: and once he had been on neighbourly terms with Clark. Yes, he replied to my question, they were saddled with him for another seven years.

Irene was more interested in Lester Ince’s future.

“Think of all that lovely money,” she said.

She told me about the heiress. It appeared that Lester Ince had at his disposal more money than any fellow (or ex-fellow, for he had just resigned) of the college in five hundred years.

“Money. We could do with a bit of that,” she said.

She said it brightly, but suddenly I felt there was strain, or meaning, underneath. To test her, I replied: “Couldn’t we all?”

“You can’t say that to us, you really can’t.” Her eyes were darting, but not just with fun.

“Is anything the matter?” I wasn’t looking at Martin, but speaking straight to her.

“Oh, no. Well, the children cost a lot, of course they do.”

Their daughter Nina, who was seventeen that year, went to a local school: she was a gentle girl, with a musical flair which her brother might have envied, and had cost them nothing. It was Pat on whom they had spent the money — and, I guessed, more than they could spare, although Martin was financially a prudent man. It was Pat about whom she was showing the strain. She had to risk offending Martin, who sat there in hard silence.

I risked it too.

“I suppose it’ll be some time before he’s self-supporting, won’t it?” I asked.

“Good God,” she cried. “We shouldn’t mind so much if we were sure that he would ever be.”

She went on talking to me, Martin still silent. I must have known young men like this, mustn’t I? What could one do? She wasn’t asking much: all she asked was that he should come to terms, and begin to behave like everyone else.

This was the strangest game that time had played with my sister-in-law. It had played a game with her physically, but that I was used to: she had been a thin, active young woman, and then in her thirties became the victim of a pyknic practical joke: so that, although her face kept an avid girlish prettiness, she had, as it were, blown up like a Michelin tyre man. But that was a joke of the flesh, and this was odder. For only a few years before, as she contemplated her son, she was delighted that he seemed “as wild as a hawk”. She had enjoyed the prospect of a son as “dashing” as the young men with whom she had herself racketed round. Now she had it. And she was less comfortable with it than respectable parents like the Getliffes might have been.

She seemed specially horrified about his debts, though, again oddly, she had no idea how big they were.

“Don’t worry too much about that,” I said. “Perhaps I can help.”

“That isn’t necessary.” For the first time since his son was hinted at, Martin spoke.

Irene looked at him: either she did not choose, or did not dare, to talk any further. In a moment, with a bright yelping cry, she announced that she was tired. “You boys can sit up if you want, don’t mind me,” she said, on her way to the door.

Martin was sitting with his shoulders hunched, his fingers laced together on one knee. His scalp showed where the hair was thinning: between us, in the old grate, gleamed one bar of the electric fire. Behind Martin was a bookcase full of bound scientific journals, photographs of teams he had played for in his athletic days: as I glanced round, in the constrained and creaking quiet, on his desk I noticed the big leather-covered tutors’ register which Arthur Brown used to keep.

Then he began to talk, in the tone of a realistic and experienced man, as though we were talking, not having to explain ourselves, about an acquaintance. He interrupted himself, seeming more deliberate, to light a pipe. It was easy to exaggerate these things, wasn’t it? (He might have been echoing my talk with Vicky.) People grew up at different rates, didn’t they? Young men who were sexually mature often weren’t mature in other ways. And young men who were sexually mature found plenty of opportunities to spend their time. “Most of us,” said Martin, in a matter-of-fact, ironic fashion, “would have welcomed a few more such opportunities, wouldn’t we?”

In an aside, he mentioned my first marriage. When I met Sheila, I was nineteen: if I had known more about women — Martin said, with dry intimacy — I should have been spared a lot.

“In his case” (he did not call his son by name), “it’s the other way round.”

He was looking away from me, with his forehead furrowed.

“I don’t know where I made the mistake. I wish I knew where to blame myself.” Quite suddenly his realism had deserted him. His tone had changed. His voice, as a rule easy and deep, had sharpened. If he had sent his son to a different school — they hadn’t been clever at handling him, they had certainly misunderstood him. If he had never started at the university — that was Martin’s fault. It was just the kind of harking back that Martin must have listened to many times in that room: from parents certain that their young man was fine, that circumstances had done all the havoc, or his teachers, or a particular teacher, or their own blindness, lack of sympathy, or bad choice.

“There’s only one rule,” I said, trying to console him. “Whatever you do is wrong.”

“That’s no use. I’ve got to make sure where I’ve made the mistakes — so that I can get him started now.”

Not only his realism had deserted him, so had his irony. That last remark of mine, which he might have thought to himself, listening to parental sorrows, was just a noise in his ears. For neither I nor anyone else could be any good to him. Irene, who was an affectionate mother, worried about her son, but practically, not obsessively; Martin’s love was different in kind. People sometimes thought him a self-contained and self-centred man: but now, more than in sexual love, he was totally committed. This had been so all through his son’s life. It was a devotion at the same time absolutely possessive and absolutely self-abnegating.

It was possible that Martin might not have been so vulnerable if his own life had gone better. He had started with ambitions, and he had got less than he or the rest of us expected. Here he was, as Senior Tutor, dim by his own standards, and that was, in careeristic terms, the end. Martin was a worldly man, and knew that he was grossly undercast. He had seen many men far less able go much further. To an extent, that had made him wish to compensate in the successes of his son. And yet, I thought it might have happened anyway: it was men like himself, stoical and secretive, who were most often swept by this kind of possessive passion.

It was a kind of passion that wasn’t dramatic; to anyone outside the two concerned, it was often invisible, or did not appear like a passion to all: and yet it could be weighted with danger, both for the one who gave the love and for its object. I had seen it in the relation of Katherine Getliffe’s father with his son. It had brought them both suffering, and to the old man worse than that. It was then that I picked up the antique Japanese phrase for obsessive parental love — darkness of the heart. Nowadays the phrase had become too florid for my taste; nevertheless, that night, as I listened to Martin, it might still have had meaning for someone who had known what he now felt.

I had seen this passion in old Mr March. But I had felt it in myself. I had felt it for one person, and — in his detached moments the reflection might strike him as not without its oddity — that was Martin. Sitting there in his study, we were middle-aged men. Although I was nine years the older, in many ways he was the more set. But when we were young, that wasn’t so; I was deprived of the children whom I wanted, and, less free than I had later become, I transferred that parental longing on to him. Once again, it had brought us suffering. It had separated us for a time. It had helped bring about crises and decisions in his career, in which he had made a sacrifice. As he spoke of his son, I didn’t bring back to mind that time long past: yet, for me at least, it hung in the air: I did not need telling, I did not need even to observe, that this parental love can be, at the same moment, both the most selfless and the most selfish of any love one will ever know.

I couldn’t give him any help. In fact, he didn’t want any. This was integrally his own. When he had brushed off my offer of money, he had done it in a way quite unlike him. Usually he was polite and not over-proud. But this was his own, and I didn’t offer money again that night. The only acceptable help was that I might arrange some more introductions for his son.

At last I was able, however, to talk about Vicky: and he replied simply and directly, more so than he had done that night, as though this were a relief or a relaxation. Did he know her?

“Oh yes, she’s been here.”

“What do you think of her?”

“She’s in love with him, of course.”

“What about him?” I asked.

“He’s fond of her. He’s been fond of a good many women. But still — he’s certainly fond of her.”

He was speaking quietly, but with great accuracy. It struck me that he knew his son abnormally well, not only in his nature but in his actions day-to-day. Whatever their struggles or his disappointments, they were closer, much closer, in some disentangleable sense, than most fathers and sons. It struck me — not for the first time — that it took two to make a possessive love.

“She’s expecting him to marry her, you know,” I said.

“I think I realised that.”

“She’s a very good young woman.”

“I agree,” said Martin.

“I’ve got a feeling that, if this goes wrong, it may be serious for her. I’d guess that she’s one of those who doesn’t love easily.”

“I think I’d guess the same.” Martin added, quite gently: “And that’s not a lucky temperament to have, is it?”

“God knows,” I said, “I don’t blame the boy if he doesn’t love her as she loves him.”

“He’s a different character. If he does love her — I can’t say for sure — it’s bound to be in a different way, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” I said, “I don’t blame him if he doesn’t want to be tied.”

“It might be what he needs,” said Martin. “Or it might be a disaster.”

“I tell you, I don’t blame him. But if she goes on expecting him to marry her — and then at the end he disappears — well, it will damage her. And that may be putting it mildly.”

“Yes.”

“She is a good young woman, and she doesn’t deserve that.”

“I hope it doesn’t happen.”

“And yet,” I said, “you don’t care, do you? You don’t really care? So long as he isn’t hurt—”

Martin replied: “I suppose that’s true.” Since we were speaking naturally, face-to-face, a flicker of his sarcasm had revived. “But it isn’t quite fair, is it? One can’t care in that way for everyone, now can one? I’m sure you can’t. You wait till your son has a girl who is besotted on him.”

He gave me a friendly, fraternal smile.

“In any case,” he went on, “whatever do you want me to do?”

“No. I don’t think there is anything you could do.”

“I’m certain there isn’t.”

“But if he’s going to drop her in the long run, it would probably be better for her if he did so now.”

“I couldn’t influence him like that,” said Martin. “No one could.” Again he smiled. “Coming from you, it doesn’t make much sense, anyway. I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen to them. You seem to have made up your own mind. But you may be wrong, you know. Haven’t you thought of that?”

7: A Question of Luck

THE afternoon was so dark that we had switched on the drawing-room lights. The windows were rattling, the clouds loomed past. It was the middle of June, and Charles was at home for a mid-term holiday. He lay on the sofa, without a coat or tie, long legs at full stretch. Margaret was out having her hair done: I had finished work, and Charles had just mentioned some observation, he told me it was Conrad’s, about luck.

Of course, I was saying. Anyone who had lived at all believed in luck. Anyone who had avoided total failure had to believe in luck: if you didn’t, you were callous or self-satisfied or both. Why, it was luck merely to survive. I didn’t tell him, but if he had been born twenty years earlier, before the antibiotics were discovered, he himself would probably be dead. Dead at the age of three, from the one illness of his childhood, the one recognition symbol which his name evoked in George Passant’s mind.

Charles had set me daydreaming. When I thought of the luck in my own life, it made me giddy. Without great good luck, I might shortly be coming up for retirement in a local government office. No, that wasn’t mock-modest. I had started tough and determined: but I had seen other tough, determined men unable to break loose. Books? I should have tried. Unpublished books? Maybe. By and large, the practical luck had been with me. On the other hand, I might have been unlucky in meeting Sheila. And yet, I should have been certain to waste years of my young manhood in some such passion as that.

Something, perhaps a turn of phrase of Charles’ or a look in his eye, flicked my thoughts on to my brother Martin. He had been perceptibly unlucky: not grotesquely so, but enough to fret him. If I had had ten per cent above the odds in my favour, he had had ten per cent below. Somehow the cards hadn’t fallen right. He had never had the specific gift to be sure of success at physics: unlike Leonard Getliffe, whose teachers were predicting his future when he was fifteen. Martin ought to have made his career in some sort of politics. True, he had renounced his major chance; it seemed then, it still seemed, out of character for him to make that sacrifice, but he had done it. I believed that it was a consolation to him, when he faced ten more dim years in college: he had a feeling of free will.

But still, he had all the gifts for modern politics. You needed more luck in that career, of course, than in science, more even than in the literary life. Nevertheless, if Martin had been a professional politician, I should have backed him to “get office” as the politicians themselves called it. He would have enjoyed it. He would have liked the taste of power. He would have liked, much more than I should, being a dignitary. And yet, I supposed, though I wasn’t sure, that he didn’t repine much: most men who had received less than their due didn’t think about it often, certainly not continuously: life was a bit more merciful than that. There were about ten thousand jobs which really counted in the England of that time. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that you could get rid of the present incumbents, find ten thousand more, and the society would go ticking on with no one (except perhaps the displaced) noting the difference. Martin knew that unheroic truth as well as I knew it. So did Denis Geary and other half-wasted men. It made it easier for them to laugh it off and go on working, run-of-the-mill or not, it didn’t matter.

Charles said: “You remember at Easter, when we came away from your father’s, what I said? I told you, it wasn’t quite what I expected.”

He had a memory like a computer, such as I had had when I was his age. But his conversational openings were not random, he hadn’t introduced the concept of luck for nothing.

“Well?” I said, certain that there was a connection, baffled as to what it was.

“I expected to think that you’d had a bad time—”

“I told you, I had a very happy childhood.”

“I know that. I didn’t mean that. I expected to think that you’d had a bad start.”

“Well, it might have been better, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure.” He was smiling, half-taunting, half-probing.

“That’s what I was thinking when I came away. I was thinking you might have had better luck than I’ve had.”

I was taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you were a hungry boxer. And hungry boxers fight better than well-fed boxers, don’t they?”

However he had picked up that idiom, I didn’t know. In fact, I was put out. I was perfectly prepared to indulge in that kind of reflection on my own account: but it seemed unfair, coming from him.

“I should have thought,” I said, “that you fight hard enough.”

“Perhaps. But I’ve got to do it on my own, haven’t I?”

He spoke evenly, good-temperedly, not affected — though he had noticed it — by my own flash of temper. He had been working it out. I had had social forces behind me, pressing me on. All the people in the backstreets who had never had a chance. Whereas the people he had met in my house and grown up among — they had been born with a chance, or had made one. Achievement didn’t seem so alluring, when you met it every day. He was as ambitious as I had been: but, despite appearances, he was more on his own.

I was talking to him very much as nowadays I talked to Martin. Sometimes I thought he bore a family resemblance to Martin, though Charles’ mind was more acute. Yes, there was something in what he said. I had made the same sort of observation when I met my first rich friends. Katherine Getliffe’s brother Charles — after whom my son was named — had felt much as he did. The comfortable jobs were there for the taking: but were they worth it? Books were being written all round one: could one write any good enough? I was twenty-three or more before I met anyone who had written any kind of book. “And that,” I observed, “was a remarkably bad one.”

Charles gave a friendly grin.

When I first went into those circles, yes, I had comforted myself that it was I who had the advantage. For reasons such as he had given. And yet — I had had to make compromises and concessions. Too many. Some of them I was ashamed of. I had sometimes been devious. I had had to stay — or at any rate I had stayed — too flexible. It was only quite late in life that I had been able to harden my nature. It was only quite late that I had spoken with my own voice.

“But all that,” said Charles, “kept you down to earth, didn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “too far down.”

“Still, it has come out all right.” He insisted: “It’s all come out more than all right, you can’t say it hasn’t?”

“I suppose I’m still more or less intact,” I said.

He knew a good deal about what had happened to me, both the praise and blame. He was a cool customer, but he was my son, and he probably thought that I was a shade more monolithic than I was.

“Don’t overdo it,” he said.

“I thought I should have a placid old age. And I shan’t.”

“Of course you will in time. Anyway, do you mind?”

I answered: “Not all that much.”

“The important thing is, you must live a very long time.”

That was said quite straight, and with concern. His smile was affectionate, not taunting. The exchange was over. I said: “Of course, if it will make things easier for you, I can disown you tomorrow. I’m sure you’d get a nice job in the sort of office I started in.”

We were back to the tone of every day. The clouds outside the window were denser, Margaret had not yet come in. Charles fetched out a chess set, and we settled down to play.

Not that afternoon, perhaps at no moment I could isolate, I realised that there was another aspect in which I was luckier than Martin. Anyone who knew us in the past, in the not-so-remote past, would have predicted that, if either of us were going to be obsessively attached to his son, it would be me. I should have predicted it myself. I was made for it. All my life history pointed that way. I had deliberately forewarned myself and spoken of it to Margaret. But, though I was used to surprises in others’ lives, I was mystified by them in my own. It hadn’t happened.

When first, a few hours after he was born, I held him in my arms, I had felt a surge of animal insistence. His eyes were unfocused and rolling; his hands aimlessly waving as though they were sea plants in a pool: I hadn’t felt tender, but something like savage, angrily determined that he should live and that nothing bad should happen to him. That wasn’t a memory, but like a stamp on the senses. It had lasted. In the illness of his infancy, I had gone through a similar animal desolation. Soon, when he learned to drive a car, I should be anxious until I heard his key in the lock and saw him safely home.

But otherwise — I didn’t have to control myself, it came by a grace that baffled me — I didn’t want to possess him, I didn’t want to live his life for him or live my own again in him. I was glad, with the specific kind of vanity that Francis Getliffe showed, that he was clever. I got pleasure out of his triumphs, and, when he let me see them, I was irritated by his setbacks. Since there was so little strain between us, he often asked my advice, judging me to be a good professional. He had his share of melancholy, rather more than an adolescent’s melancholy. As a rule, he was more than usually high-spirited. The tone of our temperaments was not all that different. I found his company consoling, and often a support.

I could scarcely believe that I had been so lucky. It seemed inexplicable and, sometimes, in my superstitious nerves, too good to be true. Call no man happy until he is dead. Occasionally I speculated about an event which I should never see: whether my son, far on in his life, would also have something happen to him which was utterly out of character and which made him wonder whether he knew himself at all.

8: Red Capsules

TWO evenings later — Charles was still at home, but returning to school next day — a telegram was brought into the drawing-room, as we were having our first drinks. Margaret opened it, and brought it over to me. It read: Should be grateful if you and Lewis would visit me tonight Austin Davidson.

Austin Davidson was her father. It was like him, even in illness, to sign a telegram in that fashion. It was like him to send her a telegram at all: for he, so long the champion of the twenties’ artistic avant garde, had never overcome his distrust of mechanical appliances, and in the sixteen years Margaret and I had been married, he had spoken to me on the telephone precisely once.

“We’d better all go,” said Margaret, responsibility tightening her face. She didn’t return to her chair, and within minutes we were in a taxi, on our way to the house in Regents Park.

Charles knew that house well. As we went through the drawing-room where Margaret had once told me I could be sure of her, I glanced at him — did he look at it with fresh eyes, now he had seen how his other grandfather lived? In the light of the June evening, the Vlaminck, the Boudin, the two Sickerts, gleamed from the walls. Charles passed them by. Maybe he knew them off by heart. The Davidsons were not rich, but there had been, in Austin’s own phrase, “a little money about”. He had bought and sold pictures in his youth: when he became an art critic, he decided that no financial interest was tolerable (Berenson was one of his lifelong hates), and turned his attention to the stock market. People had thought him absent-minded, but since he was forty he hadn’t needed to think about money.

In his study, though it was a warm night, he was sitting by a lighted fire. Margaret knelt by him, and kissed him. “How are you?” she said in a strong maternal voice.

“As you see,” said her father.

What we saw was not old age, although he was in his seventies. It was much more like a youngish man, ravaged and breathless with cardiac illness. Over ten years before he had had a coronary thrombosis: until then he had lived and appeared like a really young man. That had drawn a line across his life. He had ceased even to be interested in pictures. Partly, the enlightenment that he spoke for had been swept aside by fashion: he had been a young friend of the Bloomsbury circle, and their day had gone. But more, for all his stoicism, he couldn’t come to terms with age. He had gradually, for a period of years, got better. He had written a book about his own period, which had made some stir. “It’s not much consolation,” said Austin Davidson, “being applauded just for saying that everything that was intellectually respectable has been swept under the carpet.” Then he had weakened again. He played games invented by himself, whenever Margaret or his other daughter could visit him. Often he played alone. He read a little. “But what do you read in my condition?” he once asked me. “When you’re young, you read to prepare yourself for life. What do you suggest that I prepare myself for?”

There he sat, his mouth half-open. He was, as he had always been, an unusually good-looking man. His face had the beautiful bone structure which had come down to Margaret, the high cheekbones which Charles also inherited. Since he still stumbled out to the garden to catch any ray of sun, his skin remained a Red Indian bronze, which masked some of the signs of illness. But when he looked at us, his eyes, which were opaque chocolate brown, quite different from Margaret’s, had no light in them.

“Are you feeling any worse?” she said, taking his hand.

“Not as far as I know.”

“Well then. You would tell us?”

“I don’t see much point in it. But I probably should.”

There was the faintest echo of his old stark humour: nothing wrapped up, nothing hypocritical. He wouldn’t soften the facts of life, even for his favourite daughter, least of all for her.

“What can we do for you?”

“Nothing, just now.”

“Would you like a game?” she said. No one would have known, even I had to recall, that she was in distress.

“For once, no.”

Charles, who had been standing in the shadows, went close to the fire.

“Anything I can do, Grandpa?” he said, in a casual, easy fashion. He had got used to the sight of mortal sickness.

“No, thank you, Carlo.”

Austin Davidson seemed pleased to bring out the nickname, which had been a private joke between them since Charles was a baby, and which had become his pet name at home. For the first time since we arrived, a conversation started.

“What have you been doing, Carlo?”

“Struggling on,” said Charles with a grin.

There was some talk about the school they had in common. But Austin Davidson, though he had been successful there, professed to hate it. How soon would Charles be going to Cambridge? In two or three years, three years at most, Charles supposed. Ah, now that was different, said Austin Davidson.

He could talk to the boy as he couldn’t to his daughter. He wasn’t talking with paternal feeling: he had little of that. All of a sudden, the cage of illness and mortality had let him out for a few moments. He spoke like one bright young man to another. He had been happier in Cambridge, just before the first war, than ever in his life. That had been the douceur de la vie. He had been one of the most brilliant of young men. He had been an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual society (Margaret and I had learned this only from the biographies of others, for he had kept the secret until that day, and had not given either of us a hint).

“You won’t want to leave it, Carlo.” Davidson might have been saying that time didn’t exist, that he himself was a young man who didn’t want to leave it.

“I’ll be able to tell you when I get there, shan’t I?” said Charles. Again, all of a sudden, timelessness broke. Davidson’s head slumped on to his chest. None of us could escape the silence. At last Davidson raised his head almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate that he was addressing me.

“I want a word with you alone,” he said.

“Do you want us to come back when you’ve finished?” asked Margaret.

“Not unless you’re enjoying my company.” Once again the vestigial echo. “Which I should consider not very likely.”

On their way out Margaret glanced at me and touched my hand. This was something he would not mention in front of Charles. She and I had the same suspicion. I said, as though a matter-of-fact statement were some sort of help, that I would be back at home in time for dinner.

The door closed behind them. I pulled up a chair close to Davidson’s. At once he said: “I’ve had enough.”

Yes, that was it.

“What do you mean?” I said automatically.

“You know what I mean.”

He looked straight at me, opaque eyes unblinking.

“One can always not stand it,” he said. “I’m not going to stand it any longer.”

“You might strike a better patch—”

“Nonsense. Life isn’t bearable on these terms. I can tell you that. After all, I’m the one who’s bearing it.”

“Can’t you bear it a bit longer? You don’t quite know how you’ll feel next month—”

“Nonsense,” he said again. “I ought to have finished it three or four years ago.” He went on: he didn’t have one moment’s pleasure in the day. Not much pain, but discomfort, the drag of the body. Day after day with nothing in them. Boredom (he didn’t say it, but he meant the boredom which is indistinguishable from despair). Boredom without end.

“Well,” he said, “it’s time there was an end.”

He was speaking with more spirit than for months past. He seemed to have the exhilaration of feeling that at last his will was free. He wasn’t any more at the mercy of fate. There was an exhilaration, almost an intoxication, of free will that comes to anyone when the suffering has become too great and one is ready to dispose of oneself: it had suffused me once, when I was a young man and believed that I might be incurably ill. At the very last one was buoyed up by the assertion of the “I”, the unique “I”. It was that precious illusion, which, on a lesser scale, was a consolation, no, more than a consolation, a kind of salvation, to men like my brother Martin when they make a choice injurious (as the world saw it) to themselves.

“You can’t give me one good reason,” he said, “why I shouldn’t do it.”

“You matter to some of us,” I began, but he interrupted me: “This isn’t a suitable occasion to be polite. You know as well as I do that you have to visit a miserable old man. You feel better when you get outside. If I know my daughter, she’ll have put down a couple of stiff whiskies before you get back, just because it’s a relief not to be looking at me.”

“It’s not as simple as that. If you killed yourself, it would hurt her very much.”

“I don’t see why. She knows that my life is intolerable. That ought to be enough.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“I shouldn’t expect her,” said Davidson, “to be worried by someone’s suicide. Surely we all got over that a long while ago.”

“I tell you, it would do more than worry her.”

“I thought we all agreed,” he was arguing now with something like his old enthusiasm, “that the one certain right one has in one’s own life is to get rid of it.”

When he said “we all”, he meant, just as in the past, himself and his friends. I had no taste for argument just then. I said no more than that, as a fact of existence, his suicide would cause a major grief to both his daughters.

“Perhaps I may be excused for thinking,” he said it airily, light-heartedly, “that it really is rather more my concern than theirs.”

Then he added: “In the circumstances, if they don’t like the idea of a suicide in the family, then I should regard them as at best stupid and at worst distinctly selfish.”

“That’s about as untrue of Margaret as of anyone you’ve ever known.”

It was curious to be on the point of quarrelling with a man so sad that he was planning to kill himself. I tried to sound steady: I asked him once again to think it over for a week or two.

“What do you imagine I’ve been doing for the last four years?” This time his smile looked genuinely gay. “No, you’re a sensible man. You’ve got to accept that this is my decision and no one else’s. One’s death is a moderately serious business. The least everyone else can do is to leave one alone.”

We sat in silence, though his head had not sunk down, he did not seem oppressed by the desolating weight that came upon him so often in that room. He said: “You’ll tell Margaret, of course. Oh, and I shall need a little help from one of you. Just to get hold of the necessary materials.”

That came out of the quiet air. He might have been asking for a match. I had to say, what materials?

Davidson took out of his pocket a small bottle, unscrewed the cap, and tipped on to his palm a solitary red capsule.

“That’s seconal. It’s a sleeping drug, don’t you know.”

He explained it as though he were revealing something altogether novel — all the time I had known him, he explained bits of modern living with a childlike freshness, with the kind of Adamic surprise he might have shown in his teens at the sight of his first aeroplane.

He handed the capsule to me. I held it between my fingers, without comment. He said: “My doctor gives me them one at a time. Which may be some evidence that he’s not quite such a fool as he looks.”

“Perhaps.”

“I could save them up, of course. But it would take rather a long time to save enough for the purpose.”

Then he said, in a clear dispassionate tone: “There’s another trouble. I take it that I’m somewhere near a state of senile melancholia. That has certain disadvantages. One of them is that you can’t altogether rely on your own will.”

“I don’t think you are in that state.”

“It’s what I think that counts.” He went on: “So I want you or Margaret to get some adequate supplies. While I still know my own mind. I suppose there’s no difficulty about that?”

“It’s not altogether easy.”

“It can’t be impossible.”

“I don’t know much about drugs—”

“You can soon find out, don’t you know.”

I said that I would make enquiries. Actually, I was dissimulating and playing for time. I twiddled the seconal between my fingers. Half an inch of cylinder with rounded ends: the vermilion sheen: up to now it had seemed a comfortable object. I was more familiar with these things than he was, for Margaret used them as a regular sleeping pill. Perhaps once or twice a month, I, who was the better sleeper, would be restless at night, and she would pass me one across the bed. Calm sleep. Relaxed well-being at breakfast.

Up to now these had been innocent objects. Though there were others — mixed up in my response as for the last few minutes I had listened to Davidson — which I had not chosen to see for many years. Another drug: Sodium amytal. That was the sleeping drug Sheila, my first wife, had taken. Occasionally she also had passed one across to me. She had killed herself with them. Davidson must once have known that. Perhaps he had not remembered, as he talked lucidly about suicide. Or else he might have thought it irrelevant. At all times, he was a concentrated man.

When I told him I would make enquiries, he gave a smile — a youthful smile, of satisfaction, almost of achievement.

“Well then,” he said. “That is all the non-trivial conversation for today.”

But he had no interest in any other kind of conversation. He became withdrawn again, scarcely listening, alone.

When I returned to the flat, Margaret and Charles were sitting in the drawing-room. Margaret caught my eye: Charles caught the glance that passed between us. He too had a suspicion. But it had better remain a suspicion. Margaret had had enough of parents like some of her father’s friends, who in the name of openness insisted on telling their children secrets they did not wish to hear.

It was not until after dinner that I spoke to Margaret. She went into the bedroom, and sat, doing nothing, at her dressing table. I followed, and said: “I think you’d guessed, hadn’t you?”

“I think I had.”

I took her hands and said, using my most intimate name for her: “You’ve got to be prepared.”

“I am,” she said. Her eyes were bright, but she was crying. She burst out: “It oughtn’t to have come to this.”

“I’m afraid it may.”

“Tell me what to do.” She was strong, but she turned to me like a child.

All her ties were deep, instinctual. Her tongue, as sharp as her father’s, wasn’t sharp now.

“I’ve failed him, haven’t I?” she cried. But she meant also, in the ambiguity of passionate emotion, that he had failed her because his ties had never been so deep.

“You mustn’t take too much upon yourself,” I said.

“I ought to have given him something to keep going for—”

“No one could. You mustn’t feel more guilty than you need.” I was speaking sternly. She found it easy to hug guilt to herself — and it was mixed with a certain kind of vanity.

She put her face against my shoulder, and cried. When she was, for an instant, rested, I said: “I haven’t told you everything.”

“What?” She was shaking.

“He wants us to help him do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s never been too good at practical things, has he?” I spoke with deliberate sarcasm. “He wants us to find him the drugs.”

“Oh, no!” Now her skin had flushed with outrage or anger.

“He asked me.”

“Hasn’t he any idea what it would mean?”

Again I spoke in our most intimate language. Then I said: “Look, I needn’t have told you. I could have taken the responsibility myself, and you would never have known. There was a time when I might have done that.”

She gazed at me with total trust. Earlier in our marriage I had concealed wounds of my own from her, trying (I thought to myself) to protect her, but really my own pride. That we had, with humiliation and demands upon each other, struggled through. We had each had to become humbler, but it meant that we could meet each other face to face.

“Can you imagine,” she cried, “if ever you got into his state — and I hope to God that I’m dead before that — can you imagine asking young Charles to put you out?”

All her life, since she was a girl, she had been repelled by, or found quite wanting in human depth, the attitude of her father’s friends. To her, they seemed to apply reason where reason wasn’t enough, or oughtn’t to be applied at all. It wasn’t merely that they had scoffed at all faiths (for despite her yearning, she had none herself, at least in forms she could justify): more than that, they had in her eyes lost contact with — not with desire, but with everything that makes desire part of the flow of a human life.

“Tell me what to do,” she said again.

“No,” I replied, “I can’t do that.”

“I just don’t know.” Usually so active in a crisis, she stayed close to me, benumbed.

“I will tell you this,” I said. “If it’s going to hurt you too much to give him the stuff, that is, if it’s something you think you won’t forget, then I’m not going to do it either. Because you’d find that would hurt you more.”

“I don’t know whether I ought to think about getting hurt at all. I suppose it’s him I ought to be thinking about, regardless—”

“That’s not so easy.”

“He wants to kill himself.” Now she was speaking with her father’s clarity. “According to his lights, he’s got a perfect right to. I haven’t got any respectable right to stop him. I wish I had. But it’s no use pretending. I haven’t. All I can do is make it a bit more inconvenient for him. It would be easy for us to slip him the stuff. It would take him some trouble to find another source of supply. So there’s no option, is there? I’ve got to do what he wants.”

The blood rushed to her face again. Her whole body stiffened. Her eyes were brilliant. “I can’t,” she said, in a voice low but so strong that it sounded hard. “And I won’t.”

I didn’t know what was right: but I did know that it was wrong to press her.

Soon she was speaking again with her father’s clarity. The proper person for him to apply to for this particular service would be one of his friends. After all — almost as though she were imitating his irony — there was nothing they would think more natural.

Obviously he had to be told without delay that we were failing him. “He’ll be disappointed,” I said. “He’s looking forward to it like a treat.”

“He’ll be worse than disappointed,” said Margaret.

“I’d better tell him,” I said, trying to take at least that load from her.

“That’s rough on you.” She glanced at me with gratitude.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “But I can talk to him, there’s no emotion between us.”

“There’s no emotion between him and anyone else now, though, is there?” she said.

Once more she stiffened herself.

“No, I must do it,” she said.

She looked more spirited, brighter, than she had done that night. Hers was the courage of action. She could not stand the slow drip of waiting or irresolution, which I was better at enduring: but when the crisis broke and the time for action had arrived, when she could do something, even if it were distasteful, searing, then she was set free.

So, with the economy of those who know each other to the bone, we left it there. We returned to the drawing-room, where Charles, who was reading, looked at us, curiosity fighting against tact. “You’re worried about him, I suppose,” he allowed himself to say.

9: Trick of Memory

ALL through those weeks, I was being badgered by messages from the Pateman family. One had arrived during Charles’ break; another the evening after Austin Davidson made his request, the same day that Margaret went to him with our answer. Dick Pateman’s messages came by telephone, in the form of protracted trunk calls (who paid the bills? I wondered): he had been found a place at a Scottish university, but that made him more dissatisfied. But his dissatisfaction was not so grinding as that of his father, who wrote letters of complaint about his son’s treatment and his own. There was, I knew it well, a kind of blackmail of responsibility: once you did the mildest of good turns, natures such as these — and there were more than you imagined — took it for granted that you were at their mercy. Well, after the June Court, I had decided to pay them a last visit and say that that was the end.

Meanwhile, Margaret had faced her father: and the result was not what we expected. True, he had been bitter, he had been intellectually scornful. He regarded what he called her “mental processes” as beneath contempt. And yet, she could not be sure, was he also feeling relieved, or perhaps reprieved? At any rate, he seemed both more active and less despairing: and physically, after his announcement to us and his quarrel with her, he had, for days which lengthened into weeks, something like a remission. If that had happened to anyone else, he would have thought it one of fate’s jokes, though in slightly bad taste. During Margaret’s visits, daily though uninvited, he produced ironies of his own, but didn’t speculate on that one. As for her, she dared not say a word, in case this state were a fluke, something the mind-body could hold stable for a little while, before the collapse.

On the day of the Court meeting, which was the twenty-second of June, I arrived at the station early in the afternoon and went straight out to the university. The Court was to meet at 3.0: the proceedings would be formal: but (so I had heard from Vicky) Leonard Getliffe and two of the younger professors had decided that, since it wasn’t necessary for them to attend, they wouldn’t do so. Arnold Shaw had expressed indifference: he was going to get his vote of support, there would be no dissension. Had the man no sense of danger? I thought. The answer was, he hadn’t. Among his negative talents as a politician, and he had many, that was the most striking. If one had watched any kind of politics, big or little, one came to know that a nose for danger was something all the real performers had. They might lack almost every other gift, but not that. Trotsky, like Arnold Shaw, whom he didn’t much resemble in other respects, had singularly little nose for danger. He got on without it for a few years. If he had had it, he might have held on to the power for longer.

Thus I was sitting in Leonard Getliffe’s office (they used the American term by now) in the physics department. Outside, it was a bright midsummer afternoon, just like the weather twenty-two years before, when Leonard was nine years old, the day we heard that Hitler’s armies had gone into Russia. A motor mower was zooming over the lawn, and through the open window came the smell of new-cut grass. In the room was a blackboard covered with symbols; there were three or four photographs, among whom I recognised Einstein and Bohr: on the desk, notebooks, trays, another photograph, this time of Vicky Shaw. Not a flattering one. She wasn’t photogenic. In the flesh she had both bloom and vital force, but in two dimensions she looked puddingy.

There the picture stood, in front of him. I said, wouldn’t he reconsider and come along to the Court? After all, we had done what we could for the students. Yes, said Leonard, even Pateman had got fitted up. “The Scots can cope with him now,” I said.

“No, not the Scots.” Leonard gave the name of a university close by, only twelve miles away. “They’ve accepted him,” said Leonard.

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t see why he should invent the story, do you?” Leonard’s grey eyes were regarding me cat-humorously through his glasses. “Especially as it stops us exerting ourselves.”

No doubt that was why I hadn’t been badgered on the telephone for several days. It hadn’t been thought necessary to tell me that I wasn’t to trouble myself further.

“Well then,” I said. “It’s only a formality today. Why not come along?”

“It’s only a formality,” said Leonard. “Why come along?”

“You know as well as I do. Just to patch things up.”

“In that case, it’s not precisely a formality, is it?”

It resembled an argument with his father — over tactics, or principles, or choices — such as we had had since we were young men. But it wasn’t quite like that. Leonard was just as immovable, but gentler and at the same time more certain. The matter had been mishandled. He and his colleagues (but I now felt sure that his was the authority behind them) weren’t willing to appear placated, until they had made their own terms. They weren’t being noisy. They were merely abstaining. It was the quietest form of protest. Maybe others would understand.

“What about the Vice-Chancellor?”

“He’s only got to see reason, hasn’t he?” said Leonard.

Vicky had told me that, if she had appealed to him to go easy on her father, he would have done it. She (for once confident) was sure that she could do anything with him. But that was the one appeal she couldn’t make. One oughtn’t to use love like that, unless one can pay it back. And also I, having heard her secrets, couldn’t use it either: she had said so, direct as usual. Well, that did credit to the decency of her feelings. And yet, for once confident, she was for once over-confident. Listening to him, I didn’t believe that, if she had promised to marry him tomorrow, she would have changed one of his decisions about Arnold, or even his tone of voice.

Was it possible that, miserable about her, he — who was as decent as she was, and no more malicious — was taking it out of her father? I didn’t believe that either. It was hard to accept, but personal relations often counted not for more, but for far less than one expected. There were people who in all human affairs, not only politics but, say, the making of a painter’s reputation, who saw a beautiful spider’s web of personal connections. Such people often seemed cunning, abnormally sophisticated in a world of simple men: but when it came to practice, they were the amateurs and the simple men were the professionals.

“Can’t you really go a step or two to meet him?” I asked.

“I think it is for him to meet us.”

Dead blank. So, killing time before the Court, I chatted about some of the scientists I knew of his father’s generation — Constantine, O—, B—, Mounteney. As usual, I found an obscure amusement in the way in which Leonard and his contemporaries discussed fellow scientists twenty or thirty years older than themselves. Amiable dismissal: yes, they had done good work; once, they deserved their awards and their Nobels: but now they ought to retire gracefully and cease cluttering up the scene. Mounteney — “It’s time,” said Leonard, “that he was put out to grass.” With the same coolness Leonard remarked that he himself, at thirty-one, might very well be past his peak. His was probably the most satisfying of all careers, I said: and yet, for the reason he had just given, I was glad that it had not been mine.

Somehow, casually, I mentioned Donald Howard. It was good of Leonard to have found him a niche. No, merely sensible, said Leonard. Of course, he added vaguely, you knew something about the affair in your college, didn’t you? Yes, I knew something, I said (I felt sarcastic, but Leonard, like other conceptual thinkers, had a thin memory, didn’t store away the things he heard). I even knew Howard a bit. Would I like to see him for a minute? Out of nothing but curiosity, I said yes. Leonard spoke to the apparatus on his desk, beside Vicky’s picture. Within minutes, Howard came, head bent, into the room. He shook hands, conventionally enough. He wasn’t quite as graceless as I remembered, though he had some distance to go before he became Lord Chesterfield. His shock of hair, which used to push out from his brow, had been cut: he looked more like the soldier that most of his family had been. He wasn’t cold to me, but equally he wasn’t warm. Did he like living in the town? He’d seen worse, he said, without excess. How did he enjoy the university? It was better than a technical college, he said, without excess. He seemed to think that some conversational initiative of his own was called for. What was I doing in this place, he ventured? I had come down for the Court, I replied. I shouldn’t have thought that was worth anyone’s time, said Howard. After that, he felt that he had done his duty, and escaped.

Leonard grinned at me.

“How good is he?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s better than Francis (the Getliffe family, like Edwardian liberals, called their parents by their first names) used to think. By a factor of two.” Leonard went on to say that at the time of his dismissal from the college, and during the research which led up to it, Howard had been paralytically lacking in confidence: so much that it made him look a scientific fool. But that he wasn’t. Now he had been given a “good problem” and was having some success, he showed a certain amount of insight. He’d never be really first-rate: he’d probably never make the Royal Society, said Leonard, as though that were the lowest limit of man’s endeavour. But he could develop into a competent professor, conscientious with his students and with half-a-dozen respectable scientific papers to his name.

That sounded like a firm professional judgment. When I asked about other parts of Howard’s life, Leonard had picked up or remembered little. He didn’t know — as I had heard and believed to be true — that Howard had ceased to be a fellow traveller. He hadn’t gone through a dramatic conversion, he had just moved without explaining himself into the centre of the Labour party. About his marriage — yes, Leonard did know, coolness breaking, showing the tentative nervous interest of a man who should be married himself that Howard had divorced his wife. She had gone off with Eric Sawbridge, who, unlike Howard, had stayed a communist, pure and unbudgeable, and wouldn’t budge until he died. He had served nine years in jail, after passing on some of the early atomic information, and had come out unchanged.

“One of the bravest men I ever knew,” I said to Leonard.

“Francis says the same,” Leonard replied. But to him all this, all those crises of conscience which had riven his scientific predecessors, all the struggles, secret and public, in which his father and I had spent years of our lives, seemed like history. If he had been our age, he would have felt, and done, the same as we did. As it was, he signed the “liberal” letters, but otherwise behaved as though there were nothing else that a man of goodwill could do.

It was getting on for three, and I got up.

“I still can’t persuade you to come?” I said.

“I’m afraid not, Lewis,” he answered, with an unyielding but gentle smile.

In the Court room, one side wide open to the afternoon sun, in fact so open that curtains had to be drawn to avoid half the table being blistered, the first item on the agenda took three minutes. And those three minutes were the stately minuet. Resolution of confidence in Disciplinary Committee. The secretary reported that three of the students had found accommodation elsewhere: Miss Bolt had announced her engagement, and did not wish to undertake further study. “Any discussion?” said Arnold Shaw, sharp eyes executing a traverse. Not a word. “May I ask for a motion?” This had been prearranged: resolution of confidence, moved by a civic dignitary, seconded by an academic. “Any further discussion?” Not a word. “Those in favour?” Denis Geary looked across at me while hands were going up. No, there was no point in indulging oneself, though he, unlike me, wasn’t interested in guarding Arnold Shaw. His hand went up, so did mine. “Unanimous,” said Shaw, giving a pursed smile, with a satisfaction as great as Metternich’s after one of his less commonplace manoeuvres.

The whole of the rest of the proceedings was dedicated to the October congregation. Flummery, of course; but then people, even serious people like Denis Geary, enjoyed flummery: there were wafts of pleasure, as well as mildly dotty practical suggestions, in the air. Lord Getliffe would preside. Honorary degrees would be presented. The Court had already approved the names of the honorary graduands. Dinner. Speeches. Who should speak? That particular topic took up a long time. I sat absent-minded, while the general enjoyment went on. At last (though it was actually only about half past four) I got out into the summer air. Would I have tea? Shaw was pressing me. No, I had an engagement soon. That was embroidering the truth. For the first time on any of my visits to the town, George Passant had sent me a note — like all the letters I had ever received from him, as short and neat as a military despatch — saying that he was otherwise occupied and couldn’t meet me for our usual drink. All I had to do was call on the Patemans, when the father was home from work, and settle my account. Then I could go to the Residence, obligations fulfilled, though (I was still thinking of Leonard) not in a fashion anyone could congratulate himself upon.

Still, it was pleasant to walk by myself round the campus (that word also had swept eastward) in the still sunshine. The students were dressed differently from those I used to know: young men and girls in jeans, long hair, the girls’ faces unpainted and pale. Transistor radios hung from a good many wrists. Pairs were lolling along, arms round each others’ waists: that too wouldn’t have happened in my college before the war. I stretched myself on the grass, not far from such a group. The conversation, however, as much as I could catch, was not amorous but anxious. They nearly all carried examination papers with them. This was the time of their finals: they had just been let out of a three-hour session: they were holding inquests. Dress changed: social manners changed: sexual manners changed: but examinations did not change. These boys and girls — they must have been round twenty-one, but they were so hirsute that they looked younger — were at least as obsessed as any of us used to be. They had another paper next morning. One girl was saying that she must shut herself up that night, she needed to put in hours and hours of work. Wrong, I wanted to say: real examinees didn’t behave like that: don’t look at a book, don’t even talk about it. But I kept quiet. Whoever listened to that kind of advice? Or to any other kind of advice, except that which they were already determined to take?

It was pleasant in the sun. I was timing myself to arrive at the Patemans’ house at six. Now that I knew the way, I managed it to the minute. But Mr Pateman was not there. His wife let me in, the passage dark and odorous as I entered from the bright afternoon. From the front room the record player was, just as last time, at work. In the parlour high tea was laid. The room was empty except for Kitty, who, cutting a slice of bread, gave a little beck of recognition.

“He’s not in yet, I’m afraid,” said Mrs Pateman again.

“I told him the time I should be coming.” She was the only woman of the household whom I liked: I couldn’t let myself be rough with her.

“The doctor doesn’t have his surgery till six, you see,” Mrs Pateman began a flustered explanation.

“I’m sorry,” I had to say. “I hope there’s nothing much the matter?”

“Of course there isn’t.” Kitty gave a fleering smile. “There’s never anything the matter with him—”

“You didn’t ought to say that about your father.” Mrs Pateman seemed overwhelmed in this house, this “simple home” which even to me was uncomfortably full of egos. Kitty shrugged, looked at me under her eyebrows, and informed me that Dick was camping, and wouldn’t be back for a week. She said it in a manner which was little-me-ish and at the same time hostile, no, not so much hostile as remote from all of them. She might be resenting his having a higher education, while she, appreciably cleverer, had been kept out of one. I found her expression, partly because of its mobility, abnormally difficult to read. I guessed that she might, despite the fluttering, be as hard as the others. That was as far — and perhaps even this I imagined or exaggerated — as I could see that night.

Taking her slice of bread, she went back with light scampering steps to the front room, where I assumed that Cora Ross was waiting. Mrs Pateman, naturally polite, embarrassed, continued to explain about her husband. He was always one for going to the doctor in good time. He had a stiffness in his throat which he thought might be associated with a backache (a combination, I couldn’t help thinking to myself unknown to medical science). He was always careful about what she, echoing him, called “germs”. That accounted, I realised, for the disinfectant smell which hung about this room, even in his absence. He must add, to his other unwelcoming characteristics, a chronic hypochondria.

At last he came in, head thrown back, hand outstretched. He gave me a stately good evening, and sat down to his corned beef and tomato ketchup. Meanwhile his wife was saying: “He didn’t find anything, did he, Percy?”

“Nothing serious,” he said with a condescending smile. “I’m a great believer,” he turned to me, “in taking precautions. I don’t mind telling you, I should recommend anyone of your age to be run over by his doctor once a month.”

I said that I couldn’t stay long. I wanted only to finish up this business of his son. I hadn’t heard until that day that he had been accepted by — (the neighbouring university). That completed the story, and they ought to consider themselves fortunate.

“No,” said Mr Pateman, not angrily but in a level, reasonable fashion. “I can’t be expected to agree with that.”

“I do expect you to agree with that.” I had come to break this tie. To be honest, I didn’t mind a quarrel: but I wasn’t getting it.

“Well then, we shall have to agree to differ, shan’t we?”

“Your son,” I said, “is a remarkably lucky young man. If he were here — by the by I have not had a word from him about his news — if he were here I should tell him so. He might have been thrown out for good. As it is, this is exactly like going on at the university here as though nothing had happened.”

“Ah,” Mr Pateman smiled, an all-knowing patronising smile. “There I have to take issue with you. Do you realise that this place is twelve miles away?”

“Of course I do.”

“How is he going to get there?”

I muttered, but Mr Pateman continued in triumph: “Someone is going to have to pay his fare.”

I stared at him blank-faced. With a gesture, he said: “But I’ll grant you this. It’s not so bad as Scotland. No, it’s not so bad as Scotland. So we’d better let bygones be bygones, hadn’t we?”

He was victorious. For the moment, he was sated. I thought — not then but later, for on the spot I was outfaced, deflated, like one working himself up to a row and finding himself greeted with applause — how people say comfortably that persecution never works. Read a little history, and you find that persecution, more often than not, is singularly effective. The same with paranoia. You might think it was a crippling affliction: live some of your life, and you find that paranoia too, more often than not, is singularly effective. Certainly the streak possessed by the Patemans, father and son, had won them, in this business, what they wanted. It also made Mr Pateman that evening feel powerful as most of us never do. Paranoia of that kind is only placated for an interval, and then, like sexual jealousy, starts up again. But while it is placated, it — again like sexual jealousy — gives a reassurance which is utterly possessing, as though all enemies were conquered or annihilated, a reassurance of non-enmity that those of us who are not paranoid will never know.

Before I left, Mr Pateman favoured me with his views on civil servants. It was no thanks to me, but he was enjoying some new “brainwave” about a move for himself. He reiterated, he couldn’t remain a cashier much longer. “I’m like a bank clerk shovelling money over the counter and not having any for himself.” But he had listened to me enough to visit the Employment Exchange. As he had foreseen, he said with satisfaction, they had been useless, totally useless.

“You know what civil servants are like, do you?”

I told him I had been one, during the war and for years later.

“Present company excepted.” He gave a forgiving smile. “But you’ve had some experience outside, you ought to know what civil servants are like. Rats in mazes. You switch on a light and they scramble for the right door.”

I said goodbye. Mr Pateman, standing up and squaring his shoulders, said that he was glad to have had these talks. I asked if the new job he was thinking of was an interesting one.

“For some people,” he said, “every job is an interesting one.”

He volunteered no more. His lips were complacently tight, as though he were a cabinet minister being questioned by a backbencher of dubious discretion.

Sitting in the Residence drawing-room, a few minutes to go before dinner, I told Vicky that I had had a mildly punishing day. “Poor old thing,” she said. I didn’t say anything about Leonard Getliffe or the Pateman parlour, but I remarked that it was bleak to miss my customary drink with George. She shook her head: she didn’t know him, he was just a name from the town’s shadows.

“Anyway,” she said, “you might meet another old friend tonight.” She asked — would I let her drive me out into the country, for a party after dinner? Would that be too much for me? What was this party, I wanted to know. Parents of friends of hers, prosperous business people, not even acquaintances of mine. “But they want to collect you, you know. And it’d be a bit of a scoop for me to produce you.” Vicky gave a cheerful grimace. She had a tendency, characteristic of realistic young women, to find any symptom of the public life extremely funny. I found that tendency soothing.

Before she had time to tell me who the “old friend” was, Arnold Shaw joined us, beaming with eupeptic good humour. “Excellent meeting today, Lewis,” he said. He was feeling celebratory, and had opened one of his better bottles of claret for dinner. At the table, the three of us alone, he did not once refer to the controversy. It was over, in his mind a neat, black, final line had been drawn. He talked, euphorically and non-stop, about the October congregation. Arnold loved ceremony, protocol, anything which distinguished one man from another. If the President of the Royal Society came to receive an honorary degree, should he, or should he not, on an academic occasion, take precedence over a viscount who was not receiving a degree?

As he propounded this intricate problem, Vicky was smiling. She was still amused when he went on to what for him was the fascinating topic of honorary degrees. Here he took great trouble, and, as so often, received no credit from anyone, not even her. If a university was going to give honorary degrees at all, he had harangued me before now, it ought to be done with total purity. He would make no concessions. As so often, no one believed that he was a pure soul. Yet he had done precisely what he said. No local worthies. No putative benefactors. No politicians. Men of international distinction. No one else.

“I’m glad you mentioned the man Rubin,” he said to me. David Rubin was an American friend of mine, and one of the most eminent of theoretical physicists. “I’ve made enquiries. They say he’s good. No, they say he’s more than good.”

“Well, Arnold, the fact that he got a Nobel prize when he was about forty,” I said, “does argue a certain degree of competence.”

Arnold let out his malicious chuckle.

“Leonard Getliffe thinks a lot of him. And that young man isn’t very easily pleased.” He was glancing meaningfully at his daughter. “I always know I shall get an honest opinion from Leonard on this sort of business. Yes, he’s absolutely honest, he really is a friend of mine.”

His glance was meaningful. So, in a different sense, was mine. I hadn’t told Vicky about my conversation with Leonard: now I was glad that I hadn’t; it would have done no good and turned her evening sour. I sipped at the admirable wine. Why was Arnold so innocent? Hadn’t he noticed the abstentions from the Court? Why were he and Leonard so pure? Under the taste of the wine, a vestigial taste of blackcurrants — a vestigial reminder of a worldly man, unlike those two, a man nothing like so pure, Arthur Brown, looking after his friends in college, giving us wine as good as this, years ago.

As soon as we had settled in her car and Vicky was driving up the London Road, out of the town, I asked who was the old friend? The old friend I was to meet?

“They didn’t want to tell either of you, so that it would be a surprise.”

“Come on, who is it?”

“I think her name is Juckson-Smith.”

“I’ve never heard of her,” I said.

“They said you used to know her.”

“I’ve never heard the name.”

“Have I got you on false pretences?” Vicky glanced sideways from the wheel, to see if I was disappointed. “Juckson-Smith — I think they call her Olive.”

Then I understood. I had not seen her for thirty years. Once there had been a sort of indeterminate affection, certainly not more, between us. She had been a member of George Passant’s group, the only one of us from a well-to-do family. Those had been idealistic days, when George ranged about the town, haranguing us with absolute hope about our “freedom”. But after I left the town, some of them worked out their freedom: Olive took a lover, and under his influence got mixed up in the scandal which — to me at least, who had to watch it — had been a signpost along our way.

She had, so far as I had heard, cut off all connections with the town. Her family was respectable, and it was not a pretty story. She had married her lover, and, some time during the war, I had been told that they had parted. Presumably she had married again. All this had happened many years before, and except to a few of us, might be submerged or forgotten.

Myself I wasn’t remembering much of it, memory didn’t work like that, as Vicky drove past the outer suburbs, into the country, past the Midland fields, every square foot manmade and yet pastoral in the level light. It was past nine, but the sun was still over the horizon. Swathes of warm air kept surging through the open window, as we passed, slowing down, tree after tree.

“You do know her then?”

“I knew her first husband better. He was rather an engaging man.”

“Why was he engaging?”

“You might have liked him.” No, I shouldn’t have said that. Jack Cotery was just the kind of seducer whom this young woman had no guard against. I hurried on: “He had a knack of reducing everything to its lowest common denominator. He often turned out to be right, though I didn’t enjoy it.”

I began to tell her an anecdote. But this was one that I didn’t mind recalling. My spirits had become higher. When I was in high spirits, and letting myself go, Vicky found it hard to decide whether I was serious or not. She drove on, her expression puzzled and even slightly mulish, as I indulged myself talking about Martineau. Martineau, when I was in my teens, had been a partner in one of the town’s solidest firms of solicitors — the same firm of which George Passant was managing clerk. He was a widower, and he kept something like a salon for us all. Then, over a period of two or three years, round the age of fifty, he became invaded by religion, or by a religious search: he started wayside preaching, and before long gave up all he had, except for what he could carry, and went off as a tramp. At my college I used to receive postcards from various workhouses.

“Did you?” said Vicky, as though it were an invention.

He joined a religious community, and soon left that to become a pavement artist on the streets of Leeds. The pictures he drew were intended to convey a spiritual message. After a while, he moved to London and operated in the King’s Road. The average daily take in Chelsea was three times the take in Leeds: I picked up some information about the economics of pavement artistry in the late thirties.

“Did you?” said Vicky once more.

The point was, I said, Jack Cotery had insisted from the start that all Martineau wanted was a woman. Jack had discovered that his wife had been an invalid, he had had no sexual life right through his forties. Jack said that if he and my Sheila went off together, that would cure them, if anything could. I thought that was too reductive, too brash by half. The trouble was, about Martineau it turned out to be right.

“What happened?” Suddenly Vicky was interested.

Very simple. At the age of sixty Martineau met, Heaven knows how, a very nice and mildly eccentric woman. They got married within three weeks and had two children in the shortest conceivable time. Martineau gave up pavement artistry (though not religion) and returned to ordinary life. Very ordinary: because he became a clerk in exactly the type of solicitors’ firm in which he had been a partner and given his share away. My last glimpse of him: he had been living in a semi-detached house in Reading, running round the garden bouncing his daughter on his back. He had exuded happiness, and had survived in robust health until nearly eighty.

“I can understand that,” said Vicky, driving past the golden fields.

“Can you?”

“I shouldn’t be so edgy if I weren’t so chaste.”

“You’re not very edgy.”

“I’m getting a bit old to sleep alone.”

“You know,” I said, “it isn’t the answer to everything.”

“It’s the answer to a good many things,” she said.

From the road, a mile or two further on, one could see a house standing a long way back upon a knoll, as sharp and isolated as in a nineteenth-century print. Yes, that was where we were going, said Vicky. It was a comely Georgian façade: once, I supposed, this had been a squire’s manor house. Not now. Not now, as we drove up the tree-verged drive, car after car parked right to the door: no poor old Leicestershire squire had ever lived like this. In fact, we didn’t enter the house at all, but went round, past the rose gardens, to the swimming pool. There, standing on the lawn close by, or sitting in deckchairs, must have been sixty or seventy people. Some were in the water: waiters were going about with trays of drinks. I met my hostess, middle-aged, well dressed. I met some of the guests, middle-aged, well dressed. I found myself trying to remember names, just as if I were in America. For an instant, looking down from the pool over the rolling countryside, I wondered how I could tell that I wasn’t in America. This might have been Pennsylvania. This was a style of life that was running round the fortunate of the world. One difference, perhaps, but that was only a matter of latitude: in Pennsylvania it wouldn’t have been bright daylight at half past nine.

I had a drink, answered amiable questions, received an invitation or two: one man claimed to have played cricket with my brother Martin. My hostess rejoined me and said: “You know Olive Juckson-Smith, don’t you?”

I said, yes, I used to. She said, do come and meet her, it’ll be a surprise.

We made our way, through the jostling party, the decibels rising, the alcohol sinking, to a knot of people at the other side of the pool. My hostess called: “Olive! I’ve got an old friend for you.”

The first thing I noticed was that Olive’s hair had gone quite white. She was my own age, so that oughtn’t to have disturbed me, though for a moment, after all those years, it did. She had been, in her youth, a handsome Nordic girl, bold-eyed and strong. Her eyes still shone light-blue, but her face was drawn: she had lost a lot of weight: though her arms were muscular, her body had become gaunt. The first moment was over, the shock had gone. But I was left with the expression that greeted me. It was one of hostility — no, more than that, something nearer detestation.

“How are you?” I asked, still expecting (it was the mild pleasure I had been imagining on the way out) to meet an old friend.

“I’m well enough.” Her answer was curt, as though she didn’t want to speak at all.

“Where are you living now?”

She brought out the name of a Northern town. She was fashionably turned out. I guessed that she and her husband were as well-off as my hosts. I didn’t know whether she had had children, and I couldn’t begin to ask. I said, trying to remain warm: “It’s a long time since we met, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” Her voice was frigid, and she hadn’t given even a simulacrum of a smile.

My hostess, who was both kindly and no fool, was becoming embarrassed. To ease things over, she said to Olive that I had done a good many things in the time between. “I’ve heard of some of the things you’ve done,” Olive said to me, her face implacable.

To start with, I had thought that she was hating me because I reminded her of a past she wanted to obliterate, in which I had, quite innocently, been involved. But that seemed to be the least of it. For suddenly she began to attack me, and soon to denounce me, for parts of my public life. I had been a man of the left. My “gang”, people like Francis Getliffe and the others (she knew a number of them by name, as though she had been monitoring all we said and wrote) had done their best to bring the country to ruin. We were all guilty, and I was as guilty as any man.

If she had merely become conservative, there would have been nothing astonishing in that. It had happened to half the friends, perhaps more than half, with whom I had knocked about in my youth. But she had become fanatically so. And, for the paradoxical reason that I had lived a good deal among politicians, I was all the worse prepared to cope. In Westminster and Whitehall, in political houses such as Diana Skidmore’s Basset, your opponents didn’t curse you in private. Sometimes, at the time of Munich or Suez, one thought twice about accepting a dinner invitation — but I had never, not once, been blackguarded like this. Except, now I came to think of it, by one of my cousins, who, discovering that I had made a radical statement, told my brother Martin that he had crossed my name out of his family Bible.

There was nothing to do. I caught the eye of Vicky, who was standing not far off, made an excuse and joined her group. Then I moved round the pool, from one cordial person to another, cordial myself. They were drinking, so was I, it was like any party anywhere. Except that, when I next encountered Vicky, I said that I didn’t want to stay too long: as soon as we decently could, I should like to slip away. She was enjoying herself, but she nodded. Before half-past eleven, she was driving back into the town. Over the dark fields, the sky was dark at last.

“That wasn’t a success, was it?” she said.

“Not by the highest standards,” I answered.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry to have dragged you away.” She didn’t get enough treats, I was thinking: but she made the most of any that happened to her. She had been happy by the poolside, as though she were a child, fascinated by her first party. Nevertheless, she had witnessed some of the scene with Olive, and she had come away without a question. As I had told Martin, she was a good girl.

Never mind, she was saying, she would be taking her holiday in September, she would be in London with Pat, there would be plenty of parties. She broke off: “Was she always like that?”

“When she was your age, people might have thought she was a lot like you.”

“Oh, that’s not fair!”

“I was going on to say that they would have been dead wrong. Sometimes she seemed to think about others, but I fancy she was always self-absorbed.”

“Of course,” said Vicky in her level tone, “I suppose I am rather conservative. Most doctors are, you know.”

“But you won’t get conservative like that. If you meet Maurice” — I was choosing someone with whom she was friendly — “in thirty years’ time, you won’t tell him he’s the worst man in the world.”

She chuckled, then said: “Was it nasty?”

“No one likes being hated. I’ve known people who pretended not to care—”

“You do have to put up with some curious things, don’t you?”

She said it in her kind, aseptic fashion, and for the rest of the drive we talked about her father. When we came to the suburbs, she had to stop at a traffic light, behind another car. There was a lamp standard on the pavement, brightening the leaves of the lime tree close beside. Quite suddenly, without warning or cause, I had something like an hallucination. The number plate of the car in front, either to my eyes or in my mind, I could not distinguish whether the transformation was visual or not, was carrying different, fewer figures. NR 8150. Those were the figures in my mind. That was the number of Sheila’s father’s car, when we were twenty. She disliked driving and seldom used it. She had driven me in it only once or twice, and nowhere near this road. The car meant nothing to either of us, and I had not thought of its number in all those years. There it was. Vicky was asking me something, but all I could attend to was that number.

It was a trick of memory that seemed utterly unprovoked. At dinner the taste of claret had brought back an instant’s thought of Cambridge, but that was the kind of sensuous trigger-pressing all of us often know. It was possible that I was hyper-aesthetised to some different form of memory after the confrontation with Olive: but it didn’t strike home like that, the scene with Olive had been in the here-and-now, this was as though time itself had played a trick.

Vicky had put a hand on my arm.

“Are you all right?” she was saying.

“Perfectly.”

I was speaking the truth. I had remembered a number, that was all.