Last Things (16 page)

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

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

‘Do you know what it’s going to be?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, what about it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, it is made,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh?’

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

‘What have you been doing now?’

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

He was watching me, half-smiling.

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

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

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

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

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