Last Things (31 page)

But all that brushed off (if they were different, and they might be, it was because of their time and place) when I had a word with him alone, or later with Gordon Bestwick. Talking to Grenfell I felt obliged to bolster up his confidence. He was a nice and humble man, inconveniently torn between an embarrassing pride in his antecedents and the necessity of feeling more passionately modern than anyone around him. He wouldn’t have felt like that if he hadn’t been quite humble: he liked tagging on to people whom he believed with simplicity to be cleverer and better than he was. This led him to displays of exaggerated sensibility. His school had been ‘beastly and brutalising’. The mere thought of the army, his family profession, was beastly and brutalising too. He was very much preoccupied with the number of examination suicides at Cambridge, almost as though, frail plant that he was, he couldn’t expect both to pass his first-year Mays and to survive. In fact, he was a tough and hardy character, who didn’t need so much sympathy as he felt entitled to and modestly induced.

Whereas, in some respects, Gordon Bestwick needed more. With him, not long before Margaret and I were due to leave, I sat down on a window seat. Charles had had the intuition to guess that Bestwick and I would have something in common, and I had been told what to look for. Physically, he was gawky and tall, taller than Charles or Guy Grenfell, themselves over six feet, but he had not been as peach-fed as Grenfell; as he stretched out his legs, the thighs were thin, and there were deficiency lines from nostril to mouth. There were also other lines, premature furrows, on his forehead: his face was not exactly ugly, but plain, with wavy hair already thinning, hard intelligent eyes, square jowls. It was a physical make-up not uncommon in those whose temperament wasn’t easy to handle, what with natural force, ability, and a component of anxiety. It was the anxiety that Charles had asked me to watch; for Bestwick had been complaining, to Charles alone, of physical symptoms, and Charles had heard something of similar troubles of mine as a young man.

At that time I had been too proud to say a word. My first impression was that Bestwick was at least as proud. All I could risk was to let fall reminiscences about what it was like in my youth to be born poor. Charles had probably told him that I wasn’t stupid. It didn’t matter if he thought I was a bore. Reading for the Bar. Gambling on nothing going wrong. Strain. Lying awake at night. Sleep-starts. Pavements giving way underfoot. When the game looked in my hands, sent away ill.

If none of that applied to him (his expression was lively, but gave nothing away) he must have thought me a remarkably tedious conversationalist. Before we sat alone, he had been analysing the economic thinking of the old left. Informal, confident, not rude but dismissive. I thought I would test him. Sometimes the brightest demolition men weren’t so easy with the biological facts of life. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t anything much wrong with me. I recovered well enough to have my heart stop last November.’

He gave a grim friendly smile. ‘I heard about that,’ he said. ‘You look as though you’re hanging on all right, though. Aren’t you?’

He was treating me as an equal, that was good. It was just possible that psychosomatic recollections hadn’t been a bad idea. He might have been glad to hear that he wasn’t unique. I should have been glad of that, at his age.

We went on talking. An American black had been talking to a knot of admirers earlier on. Now they (American blacks), said Bestwick, were in a genuinely revolutionary situation. While the total of the United States society was nowhere near it, as far away as you could get. So that with Americans of student age, the counterparts of the people in this room, you had a revolutionary climate without a revolutionary situation. Had that ever occurred before?

He was worth listening to, I was thinking. Charles might have overestimated him, but not excessively. Perhaps his mind was not as precise as Charles’, which, as the mathematical analysts used to say, tended to be deep, sharp and narrow. Bestwick’s mind was certainly broader than Charles’, and possibly more massive. It was a pleasure to meet ability like this: a pleasure I used to feel, then for a time lost, and now had begun to enjoy again.

There was something else about him, quite minor, which interested me. His voice was pleasant, his tone was confident but unaggressive, but he hadn’t made any audible attempt to change his accent or his manner. If I hadn’t known his home town, I should still have guessed that he came from Birmingham or somewhere near. There were the intrusive
g
’s, ring-ging, hang-ging, which I used to hear when I travelled twenty miles west from home. In my time those would have gone. Except for the odd scientist like Walter Luke, people of our origins, making their way into the professional life, tried to take on the sound of the authoritative class. It was a half-unconscious process, independent of politics. Bestwick hadn’t made any such attempt. Yet he was a man made for authority. The social passwords had changed. Again it was a half-unconscious process. Perhaps he took it for granted that there wasn’t an authoritative class any more, or that it existed only in enclaves, bits and pieces. Curiously enough, I thought, that might not make things easier for him.

Just then Nina came up, smiled at me through her hair, and whispered to Gordon Bestwick. ‘When the party’s over, we’re all going to the Eagle. Is that OK for you?’

‘Fine,’ said Bestwick, and she slipped away. His eyes followed her, and he called out: ‘Mind you wait for me.’ It sounded masterful: was it as relaxed as when he talked to me?

I had not been told that those two knew each other. On the other hand, he must have been aware that she was a relative of mine. That might have made me more tolerable, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, when I said that Charles must bring him to stay with us at the end of term, he was eager, and less certain of himself than he had been at any time before.

Half an hour later, out at the Getliffes’ house, the level of comfort rose again. When we moved into the dining-room, the long table was not set for so many places as it often was: only for nine, which slightly took away from the normal resemblance to a Viking chieftain’s hall, that resemblance which was responsible for Charles naming it the Getliffe steading. We were used to the sight of Francis at one end of his table presiding over a concourse. That night, as it happened, besides Margaret and me, there were only Martin and Irene, who had followed us out from the college, the Getliffes’ second son Peter and his wife, and their elder son, Leonard. Francis was pushing decanters round, gazing down the table with an expression of open pleasure, just faintly tinged with saturnine glee. Everyone there knew each other. Martin and he had, after a good many years of guarded and respectful alliance, at last grown intimate. While Martin, before he and Francis became specially friendly, had long been fond of the Getliffe sons. And there was, as often in that house, something to celebrate. Leonard had been offered a chair in Cambridge, and one that even he, at the top of his profession, was pleased to get. How far he had recovered from his unrequited love, I didn’t know, and probably Francis didn’t. But he wasn’t migrating to Princeton after all, and Francis and Katherine, who liked their dynasty round them, were happy. Peter, settled in a university job, Ruth, the elder daughter, married to another don, now Leonard, persuaded to come back. That left only their youngest, Penelope, who was pursuing an erratic matrimonial course in the United States.

In the warm candlelight – one could hear windows rattling in the wind – Katherine was saying: ‘It’s funny, your Charles being so high (she put her hand below the table) and ours grown up.’

‘He’s taller than I am, dear,’ I replied, ‘and just about to take Part I.’

‘No! No! I meant, when you brought him here and Margaret put her foot in it, and that woman from Leeds thought you were a clergyman.’

Katherine was proceeding by free association: that was an occasion something like sixteen years before, though all the details were lost, certainly in my memory and Margaret’s, probably in that of the woman from Leeds, and were preserved only in Katherine’s. If you wanted to live outside of history, to dislocate time, then Katherine was the one to teach you: but, it happened very rarely, for once that total recall had slipped. At the time of this incident, Charles would have been about two. If so, Leonard, their oldest, had barely left school.

I pointed this out to Katherine, who expostulated, wouldn’t admit it, laughed, was disconcerted like an
avant-garde
American confronted by an example of linear thinking. Katherine’s thinking, I told her, was far from linear: then had to apologise, and explain with labyrinthine thoroughness (for Katherine didn’t easily subside) what the reference meant.

That led, transition by transition, to the party from which Margaret and I had come. Yes, we had been mixing with the local
avant-garde
: or the protesters: or the new left: or the anarchists: or the post-Marxists: they had all been there, all they had in common was the Zeitgeist, they wanted different things, they would end up in different places.

‘Oh well,’ said Francis, ‘that has happened before.’

I corrected myself, hearing him take it so facilely. Perhaps I had spoken like that too. I said that for some purposes, just at present they were at one.

Up and down the table, the others argued with me. There was one feature of that family party; on most issues, either of politics or social manners, we were, with minor temperamental shades, pretty well agreed. Irene had taken on most of Martin’s attitudes: Katherine had always been ready to believe that her husband was usually right. That wasn’t true of Margaret, certain of her own beliefs, which weren’t quite mine; she would have fitted better in an age when it was natural to be both liberal, or Whiggish, and also religious. Still in terms of action she was close to the rest of us.

As for the young Getliffes, there seemed next to nothing of the fathers-and-sons division. Even that family couldn’t invariably have been so harmonious: but certainly on politics they spoke like their father, or like other radicals from the upper middle class – not so committed as he had been, perhaps, but independent and ready to take the necessary risks. They were scientists like Francis, and that gave them a positiveness which sometimes made Margaret, and even me, wish to dissent. Nevertheless, those shades of temperament didn’t matter, and on the likely future and what ought to be done – the future of fate and the future of desire – there wouldn’t have been many dinner tables that night where there was less conflict.

Such conflict as did emerge was on a narrow front. The young Getliffes, both in their early thirties, were more cut off from Charles and his society, more impatient with them, than the rest of us.

‘It’s all romantic,’ said Leonard Getliffe at one point. ‘I’m not a politician, but they don’t know the first thing about politics.’

‘That’s not entirely true,’ I said.

‘Well, look. They think they’re revolutionaries. They also think that revolution has something to do with complete sexual freedom. They might be expected to realise that any revolution that’s ever happened has the opposite correlative. All social revolutions are puritanical. They’re bound to be, by definition. Put these people down in China today. Haven’t they the faintest idea what it’s like?’

That was a point I had to concede. I was thinking, yes, I had seen other groups of young people dreaming of both their emancipation and a juster world. That was how George Passant started out. Well, all, and more than all, of the emancipation he prescribed to us had realised itself – in the flesh – before our eyes. And we had learned – here Leonard was right – you can have a major change in sexual customs and still leave the rest of society (who had the property, who was rich, who was poor) almost untouched.

‘The one consolation is’, said Martin, ‘human beings are almost infinitely tough. If you did put them down in China, they’d make a go of it. I suppose if we were young today, we shouldn’t be any worse off than we actually were. They seem to find it pretty satisfactory.’

He might have been speaking of his son or, nowadays more likely, of his daughter.

‘Think of the time I should have had!’ Irene gave a yelp of laughter. Her husband laughed with her, troubles long dead, and so did the rest of us. One could have remarked that, considering the restrictions, her actual time had not been so uneventful.

Francis brought out a bottle of port, which nowadays we didn’t often drink. Sexual freedom apart, I asked them, did they think there was nothing else in this – assertion, unrest, rebellion, alienation, of the young, you could call it what you liked? It was happening all round the world. Yes, it might be helped by commercialism. Yes, it hadn’t either an ideology or a mass political base. But they (the Getliffes) were writing it off fairly complacently, they might be in for a surprise. Of course, if people of that age (I returned to something I had been thinking in Grenfell’s rooms) were different at all, it was nothing ultra-mundane, it was because of their time and place. But somehow their time was working on them pretty drastically. I wasn’t much moved by historical parallels. This was here and now. There were sometimes discontinuities in history. On a minor scale, we might be seeing one.

I didn’t find it necessary that, the previous summer, I should have been arguing on the Getliffes’ side, in the opposite sense. Well, I had changed my mind. As completely as all this? Perhaps my experience with young Pateman and his student following had prejudiced me against Charles’ friends, or perhaps I had overreacted to him. Anyway, these weren’t another crop of Lester Inces; some day I ought to tell Charles that there I had been wrong.

Most of the dinner party knew that I wasn’t detached, and that I was so interested because of my son. But Francis and Katherine had an affection for him, as well as for us. Martin and Irene too had their reasons for being interested. It was only the young couple and Leonard who were regarding the phenomenon as being a pure exercise in sociology. Since it was a cheerful evening, I didn’t suppress a gibe at the expense of Peter and his wife. They already had two children, five and three. A dozen years or so, and it would be their turn next. Either like this, or something different. Possibly stranger still.