Last Things (29 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How fine this is,’ I said.

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

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

‘We all envy you, you know.’

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

‘So do you,’ I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They matter to most of us.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you hope for?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why are you in it at all?’

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

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

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

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

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

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