Last Things (30 page)

She gave what for her was an open smile, like a woman, utterly confident with men, suddenly enjoying an offhand, not over-flattering remark: ‘But now you’re talking about it,’ I went on, ‘I suppose you will get married again, some time?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’ Then she added, as though she had spoken too simply: ‘It’s the only thing I was brought up for, you see. And that isn’t a point in its favour, particularly.’

In the same quiet, judicious tone she was blaming her mother for her education, being prepared for nothing but that, protected, watched over. In the quiet judicious tone she wasn’t concealing that she disliked her mother – with not just a daughter’s ambivalence or rebellion, but with plain dislike. If she hadn’t been trained for the marriage stakes, she might have done something. Anyway she had made her own marriage. That hadn’t been a recommendation for trying it again. She didn’t refer to Pat with dislike, as she did her mother, but with detachment, not mentioning his name. She spoke of her marriage as though it had been an interesting historical event or an example of mating habits which she had happened to observe.

‘I don’t intend to make a mess of it again,’ she said. ‘But you needn’t worry about me. I shan’t die of frustration. I can look after myself.’

It seemed as though she was being blunt: but even when she seemed to be, and maybe was, trying to be direct, she could sound disingenuous at the same time. Was she suggesting, or stating, that she wasn’t going to risk another marriage, but took men when she wanted them? Was that true in fact?

There had been a time when I thought the opposite. As I watched her getting rid of Pat, or as the centre of attraction at one of the previous summer’s parties, it seemed to me that she might have had bad luck: the bad luck that goes with beauty. Not that her face was beautiful: people looked at her long nose, wide mouth, didn’t know how to describe her. Pretty? Alluring? But she behaved like others whom everyone called beautiful. It wasn’t good to be so. Those I had met – there were only two or three – had been unable to give love or else were frigid. It wasn’t simply the shape of a face that made others decide that a woman had the gift of beauty. They had to feel some quality which set her apart and came from inside. There was nothing supernatural about it: it might very well be a kind of remoteness, a sensual isolation or a narcissism.

Whatever it came from, the gift of beauty – as the old Yeats knew too well – was about the last one would wish for a daughter.

When I had seen Muriel surrounded by Charles and his friends, attention brushing off her, she was behaving as though she need not look at them, but only at herself. As I said, I thought then that she had had that specific bad luck, or, if you like, that fairy’s gift.

Now I had changed my mind. I didn’t know much about her, there were things which I couldn’t know: but I was fairly sure that she was less narcissistic than I had believed and, underneath the smooth, the sometimes glacial front, a good deal more restless. She didn’t radiate the hearty kind of sexuality that anyone could find in the presence of, for example, Hector Rose’s new wife. But she had – I wasn’t certain but I guessed – a kind of sexuality of her own. It might be hidden, conspiratorial, insinuating. Some man would discover it (I couldn’t tell whether Pat had or not), and then would find the two of them in a sensual complicity. It wouldn’t be hearty: it might even seem corrupt. But some man, not put off by whispers or secrets, enjoying the complicity, would find it. He might be fortunate or unfortunate, I couldn’t guess that far.

I didn’t like her. I never had: and, now that I had seen a little more, I didn’t like her any better. She might be easier to love than to like: but, if that was what she induced, it was a bad prospect for her and anyone who did love her so. If I had been younger, I should have shied away.

Yet, in a curious sense, I respected her. Of course, her attraction had its effect on me as on others. But though that sharpened my attention, it didn’t surround her with any haze or aura. She was there, visible and clear enough, not specially amiable, certainly not negligible. She was not much like anyone I had known. The links one could make with the past didn’t connect with her. She was there in her own right.

Earlier on, as we climbed up and down the house, and again when she talked about the programme of action, she had mentioned Charles. Almost precisely as he had mentioned her, when it would have been artificial, or even noteworthy, not to do so.

Now, shortly after she had switched on the reading lamp, which, throwing a pool of light upon the desk, also lit up both our faces, she asked a question. It was casual and matter-of-fact.

‘By the way, do please tell me, what is Charles going to do?’

‘What ever do you mean?’

She was smiling. ‘Please tell me. I’m fairly good at keeping quiet.’

I said: ‘I’m sure you are. But I’ve no idea what you mean.’

‘Haven’t you really?’

I shook my head.

She was still smiling, not believing me. To an extent, she was right not to believe.

‘Well then, do forgive me. What is he going to do about his career?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘But you must have.’

‘I’m not certain that he has himself. If so, he hasn’t told me.’

‘But you have your own plans for him, haven’t you?’

‘None at all.’

She gazed at me, showing her scepticism, using her charm.

‘You must have.’

‘I’m not sure how well you know him–’

Her expression didn’t alter, she was still intent on softening me.

‘–it would be about as much use my making plans for him as it would have been for your father. But I haven’t the faintest desire to, I haven’t had since he was quite young.’

I told her, when he was a child, I watched his progress obsessively from hour to hour. Then I dropped it, determined that I wouldn’t live my life again in him. Fortunately, now that I could see what he was really like. I didn’t tell her, but now for me he existed, just as she did, in his own right. Embossed, just as persons external to oneself stood out. Like that, except perhaps for the organic bonds, the asymmetry that had emerged for moments in the hospital bedroom.

‘That’s very splendid,’ said Muriel, ‘but still you’re not quite so simple as all that, are you?’

‘I’ve learned a bit,’ I said.

‘But you haven’t forgotten other things you’ve learned, I can’t believe it. I’ve heard my father say’ (by that she meant Azik Schiff, whereas a few minutes before I had been thinking of Roy Calvert) ‘that you know as much about careers as any man in England.’

She went on: ‘You won’t pretend, I’m sure you won’t, that you haven’t thought what Charles ought to do. And whatever it is, you know the right steps, you can’t get rid of what you’ve done yourself, can you?’

‘I might be some use to one or two of his friends,’ I said. ‘Such as Gordon Bestwick. But not to him.’

‘You’re being so modest–’

‘No, I know some things about him. And what I can do for him. After all, he’s my son.’

She said: ‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I love him.’

She was totally still. Sitting there, body erect in the chair, she seemed not to have moved an involuntary muscle, except for the play of smiles upon her face.

I wanted to say something emollient. I remarked: ‘I’ve told him, I shall make him financially independent at twenty-one. That’s the only thing I can do.’

Suddenly she laughed. Not subtly, nor with the curious, and not pleasing, sense of secret intention which she often gave: but full-throatedly, like a happy girl.

‘It really is extraordinary that that’s still possible today, isn’t it? Talk about justice!’

‘My dear girl, it would have seemed even more extraordinary forty-odd years ago, when I was Charles’ age, if someone had done the same for me.’

I explained that, until my first wife died, I had received exactly £300 which I hadn’t earned. And even that made a difference. Muriel was not in a position to talk, I told her, waving my hand to indicate the house in which we happened to be sitting. But now she didn’t resent being reminded about being an heiress. Somehow that exchange, singularly mundane, about riches, poverty, inherited wealth, had made us more friendly to each other.

Not at the instant when I heard her question about Charles, but soon after, I had realised that this was the point of the meeting. For some reason which she was hiding or dissimulating, it was to ask about his career that she had taken pains to get me to her house alone. Not for the sake of information, but to face me and what I wanted. Why she needed that so much, was still a mystery to me.

There was lack of trust on both sides, or something like a conflict or a competition, as though we were struggling over his future. I suspected that she intended to keep him close to their group, cell, movement, whatever they cared to call it: she had power over a good many young men, maybe she had power over him. I didn’t know whether she felt anything for him. Did she assume that I was playing a chess game with her, thinking some moves ahead to counter hers? If so, I thought, she was overrating herself.

Yet Muriel had faced me. Though there was nothing to struggle about, we had been struggling. Underneath the words, precise on her side, deliberately offhand on mine, there had been tempers, or feelings sharper than tempers, not hidden very deep. Now we were quieter.

‘He is very unusual,’ she said without explanation.

‘In some ways, yes.’ I had heard that opinion from his friends, as well as from her: it struck them more than it did me.

‘So it matters what he does.’

‘It will probably matter to him.’

We weren’t crossing wills: this was all simple and direct.

‘He is very unusual,’ she repeated. ‘So it might matter to others.’

‘Yes, if he’s lucky, so it might.’

CAMBRIDGE in May. Margaret and I walked through the old streets, then along Peas Hill, where in winter the gas flares used to hiss over the bookstalls. The gas flares would have looked distinctly appropriate that afternoon, for a north-west wind was funnelling itself through the streets, so cold that we were bending our heads, like the others walking in our direction: except for one imperturbable Indian, who strolled slow and upright, as though this was weather that any reasonable man would much enjoy. The clouds scurried over, leaden, a few hundred feet high. It was like being at Fenners long ago, two or three of us huddled in overcoats, waiting for ten minutes’ play before the rain.

Soon Margaret and I had had enough of it, and turned back. Cambridge in May. It was so cold that the early summer scents were all chilled down: even the lilac one could scarcely smell. We were staying with Martin (I had come up, as I promised Charles, to have a look at his friend Bestwick), and we hurried back to the tutorial house. There in his drawing-room we stood with our backs to the blazing coal fire, getting a disproportionate pleasure from the wintry comfort and the spectacle of undergraduates haring about in the wind and rain below.

We were not so comfortable in the early evening, when Charles, in order to produce Gordon Bestwick without making him suspicious, had arranged something like a party in Guy Grenfell’s rooms. It was the least lavish of parties. As I had noticed before, the young men and women drank very little, much less than their predecessors. Some of their friends smoked pot, and they didn’t condemn it, any more than they condemned anything in the way of sex. But they condemned racism, which had become, even to contemporaries of theirs who weren’t militant at all, the primal sin: which meant that when Grenfell, as a concession to the past, gave Margaret and me small glasses of otherwise unidentifiable sherry, one knew that it was not South African. Most of the group (it might have been because they intended to have a meeting that night, or even because Grenfell, who was well off, was also mean) contented themselves with beer or even the liquid emblem of capitalism, Coca Cola.

The room was on the ground floor, and very handsome: but it was also very cold. Before the war, there would have been a coal fire, as in Martin’s sitting-room: but now Grenfell’s college had installed central heating, and turned it off for the Easter term. I remarked to Bestwick, soon after I met him, that privileged living had become increasingly unprivileged, ever since I was a young man. Just in time to do him completely in the eye, he said, which pleased me, being less stark than I expected. Young men came in and out, sometimes meeting Margaret or me, usually not introduced. There were some good faces, one or two (as in any company of the political young that I had ever seen) with idealists’ eyes. There was plenty of character and intelligence moving through the room. A young woman, voice strained with distress, blamed me for Vietnam. One or two asked questions about Russia, which I knew, and China, which I didn’t: but were more interested in the second than the first. Charles March’s younger daughter passed by, and my niece Nina, who must have made a special trip from London. Someone spoke angrily about students’ rights.

It was no use speaking to the young as though you were young yourself. If you did, they distrusted you. Often they suspected you of a sexual motive: and they were sometimes right.

Students. They all called themselves students. Yet the term was scarcely heard in Cambridge when I first arrived there. They wouldn’t have been interested in that reflection. They were singularly uninterested in history. Not that that differentiated them much from other generations. We had all believed that we were unique: and these, as much as any.

Did anything differentiate them? On the surface, looks and manners. When one couldn’t see, or didn’t notice, their faces, some did look unlike anything this century. Guy Grenfell, for instance, grew his hair as long as a Caroline young man. Which seemed odd since his face had the port-wine euphoria, the feminine (but not effeminate) smoothness, of one of his eighteenth-century ancestors, and his manners once more struck me as strangely managed, as though he were determined to forget any he had ever known and was hoping to invent some for Year One, and to find the equivalence of
citoyen
and
tovarishch
. The result was not, as he presumably hoped, that he sounded like my forebears or Gordon Bestwick’s, but like his own at their most aggressive, on a foreign railway station in brazen voices hailing a porter.