Last Things (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s a nuisance,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I replied, without interest. ‘Have you?’

‘I’ve been to see Muriel.’

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

‘She’s got rid of Pat.’

At last I was listening.

‘She’s got rid of him.’

‘Does she mean it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Anyway, I’m here.’

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

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

‘You’re looking sombre,’ he said.

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

I said something evasive and putting off.

‘You’ve got something on your mind.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It may be a drag–’

‘Never mind that.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You can’t be sure.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, have you?’