Last Things (13 page)

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

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

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

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

‘How true is it?’

‘Not far off.’

I asked: ‘So S— is really going?’

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

‘And you?’

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

That was what I expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t want you to make a mistake–’

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

‘Haven’t you?’

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