Last Things (32 page)

That night at the dinner table, it was natural to think of Francis’ grandchildren a dozen years ahead. Francis’ life, at times strained, dissident, dutiful, had nevertheless held more continuity than most of ours. His father had lived not unlike this. His sons were already doing so. Though Francis’ hospitality was all his own, spontaneous and disconcerting to those who knew only his public face. That night he was in cracking spirits, talking of changes he had already seen, prepared to see more, jeering at himself and me for false prophecies, of which there had been plenty, gazing with astringent fondness at his family and friends. It was natural to think of that family going on.

While we were having our evening at the Getliffes, Bestwick and Charles and the others were at work. They were more active than we, or any of their predecessors, had been: or rather, we had talked a good deal but not acted, while they didn’t recognise any gap between the two. They weren’t ready to wait, as we had waited, until we had won a little, even the most precarious, authority. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they were getting down to business. They were doing so that night. Where in Cambridge they met I didn’t know, either then or later: nor what was decided, nor who took part. Charles had learnt discretion very early, and so I found had Bestwick, when I knew him better; neither of them at any stage told me, or even hinted at, anything I shouldn’t hear. It was only later, from another source, and a most unlikely one, that I could piece together fragments of the story.

‘THE only examinations they’d heard of were medical ones. They weren’t very good at getting through those.’

It was Gordon Bestwick, talking of his family.

‘The same would be true of mine,’ I said. ‘I doubt if any one of them had ever taken a written examination until I did.’

Bestwick nodded his massive head, but he was faintly irked. He didn’t want me to be a partner in obscurity. He had been staying with us for a week, the first time, he said, that he had been inside a professional London home. It might have suited his expectations better if this had been more like my own first visits to the Marches, back in the twenties, butlers, footmen, wealth for generations on both sides. I had a feeling that he was disappointed that we lived so simply.

That evening he was sitting in our drawing-room after dinner, alone with Margaret and me. On the other days since Bestwick’s arrival, Charles had prompted me into having a series of guests to dinner, but that night he had some engagement of his own and had begged off. It was late in June, somewhere near the longest day, and the sky was like full daylight over the park.

‘Carlo didn’t suffer from the same disadvantage, though,’ he said.

‘If it was a disadvantage,’ I replied. ‘In some ways you and I may have had the better luck. He thinks so–’

‘And it’s like his blasted nerve. I don’t mind all that much his having been given ten yards start in a hundred, but when he gets explaining that it made things more difficult for him, that’s more than I can take.’

Margaret smiled. The two young men were more than allies, they were on comradely terms. Gordon was, so far as I had heard, the only one of Charles’ intimates who called him by his family pet name. But there was a mixture of envy and admiration which flowed both ways. Charles would have liked the dominance which he, and other acquaintances of ours older than he, couldn’t help feeling in Gordon. One didn’t have to be a talent spotter to recognise Gordon’s ability, that shone out: but I wondered whether there wasn’t something else. One or two chips bristled like iguana scales on his shoulders: but he managed to sink them, when he talked about those who really were deprived. He knew and cared. Privileged men were still vulnerable when they heard that kind of voice.

But those were times when Gordon was on duty. During his week with us, especially when he was talking to Margaret, one saw another aspect. He became attentive and anxious to please. Once or twice, trying to entertain her, he looked not mature, as he did addressing Hector Rose, but younger than his years.

In private Margaret told me that, though she liked him, she didn’t find him attractive as a man: and that she believed that would have been the same if she had been his own age. After that I asked Charles how Gordon got on with women. Charles reflected. Perhaps Gordon wasn’t his first choice for sexual confidences. ‘Oh,’ said Charles at length, ‘he’s a bit of a star, you know, he’s had one or two offers. Chiefly from very rich girls–’ Charles grinned. But Gordon, he went on, was pretty concentrated, he didn’t have much time to spare. The only girl in whom he seemed ‘interested’ (the peculiarly anaemic word which they used and which their more inhibited predecessors would have thought genteel) was Nina.

It was thundery, as Gordon sat in the drawing-room with us, and Margaret said she had a headache. I invited Gordon to come out for a drink. He looked hesitant as though we weren’t being solicitous enough or as though there were an etiquette in which he hadn’t been instructed. Margaret said Go on, it’ll do you good, and promised, in case Charles returned, to send him after us.

In the heavy air Gordon and I walked through the backstreets, as I had done with my stepson one Christmas Day. The clouds were thickening, but it hadn’t yet begun to rain, and outside a pub people were sitting round the open-air tables, at one of which Gordon and I settled down with pints of beer. Lightning flashes from the direction of the park. Growls of thunder far away. Close by the pavement kerb, cars, headlights shining in the murk, passed as on a conveyor belt on their way from Paddington.

It used to be a quiet pub, I remarked to Gordon, when I first lived in Bayswater Road. Now we might as well be sitting in a café in one of the noisier spots in Athens.

‘Never been abroad,’ he said, big frame relaxed, ingesting bitter. ‘Come off it, Gordon. We all know there is no sorrow like unto your sorrow. We also know that you could get large grants to travel any time you chose to ask for them. Which is more than I ever could. You’re rather inert physically and rather unadventurous, that’s all.’

He was used to some of my techniques by now, and gave a matey smile. I went on baiting him. He blamed too much on to environment and hoped for too much from environment. That had always been the mistake of romantic optimists. If he and his friends were going to hammer some sense into progressive thought, they had to dispose of that mistake. Gordon didn’t mind a challenge. He didn’t believe in any sort of Calvinism, scientific, intuitive or any other. The only thing you could change was environment. Change the environment of the working class – and he knew what the working class was like, he was born right there, he didn’t romanticise them, he didn’t want them to stay as they were – and they would become better.

Granted, I said: but what you could do by changing environment for anyone or any group of people had its limits.

We’ve got to believe that there are no limits, said Gordon.

In that case you’re in for another of the progressive disillusions.

If so, he said, we’ll all take that when we come to it: we’ve got to act as though we can make a new species.

You’ve got to act like that, but you mustn’t expect it.

It does good to expect the best.

There I wasn’t with him, I said. If you expect the best, then you’re blinding yourself to the truth.

Truth sometimes has to be put into suspended animation.

I don’t believe, I said, that you achieve good action – not for long – if the base is anything but true.

It was an old argument, but new facts were flooding in. He knew them as well as I did. He was an honest controversialist, ready to grope and brood. I had never had a great taste for argument, had lost what little I once had: but it was pleasant arguing with him. In the headaching night we drank more beer, talked on, heard from inside the pub the call of time, and then saw the first half-crowns of rain bombing the pavement.

‘We’d better hurry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to get wet.’

Running in bursts, sheltering under porticoes, lumbering, panting, we reached the main road. He was more mobile than I was, but not a track performer. The storm had broken, water was sploshing up to our shins. We made a last run to the block of flats. There, under cover of the doorway, we halted, so that I could get my breath.

‘Good God,’ said Gordon, pointing up the street towards Marble Arch. There was a solitary figure on the pavement, sauntering very slowly. When it passed into zones illuminated by the arc lamps, one saw it through lances of rain.

‘Carlo,’ said Gordon.

He came towards us, not altering his pace. Watching him, I caught a fresh smell of wet leaves, bringing peace.

When one saw his face, he was wearing a smile, as though satisfaction were brimming over from inside. For an instant I thought that he was drunk.

‘Hallo,’ he called, from a couple of yards away.

He was dead sober.

‘Christ, man,’ Gordon greeted him, ‘you’re wet through.’

It wouldn’t have been possible to be much wetter.

‘So I am,’ said Charles in a mild tone. He looked at us with something like affectionate surprise. He didn’t say any more, but his smile was pressing to return, and he didn’t restrain it.

About a fortnight after Gordon had returned home, in the middle of July, Charles insisted on treating Margaret and me to a show and taking us out to supper afterwards. The show had to be a film, since to him and his circle the theatre was an obsolete art form, which ought to have gone out with the Greeks or certainly with Shakespeare. The show also had to be a film he had seen before so that he could guarantee it. In the cinema he placed himself punctiliously between Margaret and me, whispering to her during the film, showing her an obsessive, and for him unusual, degree of filial attention.

Nothing was said that night. It was the next day, after tea, sitting with both of us in the drawing-room, when he said, quietly but with no introduction at all: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of moving into Chester Row. I’m sure you don’t mind, do you?’ He was speaking to Margaret, with whom his surface conflict had in the past flared up. ‘Of course you don’t mind, I shall be around, of course.’

‘Chester Row?’ she said in flat surprise.

‘Are you, by God?’ I said. I had a picture of him walking in the rain, the other night: slow, smile of joy, smell of wet leaves. I should never know whether I was right. Had he just come away from her? Was he retracing the history of the race? Did he feel that this was a unique achievement, that it had just been done for the first time?

‘When are you aiming to go?’ said Margaret, as though she were gripping on to practicalities.

‘As a matter of fact, if it doesn’t put anyone out, I was thinking of moving tonight.’

‘How long for?’

‘Indefinite.’ He gave her a smile, reassuring but secretive.

She began to speak and then thought better of it. Charles was giving out happiness, now that he had broken the news, but wasn’t willing to say another word about it. By a curious kind of understanding, almost formal, we all behaved as on the most uneventful of evenings. We looked at the television news at 5.50. Afterwards at dinner Charles made a fuss of his mother. The only references he made to his announcement were strictly practical. He didn’t want anyone at all, including Guy Grenfell, Gordon, his cousins (there were good reasons for that at least, I thought), to hear where he was living. He would collect letters every two or three days. As for telephone calls, we were to say that he was out but would ring back, and then pass the message on to Chester Row. He apologised for the nuisance, but it was necessary.

I didn’t enquire why. It was true that he often carried security precautions to eccentric lengths. If this had happened to me in comparable circumstances, I couldn’t help thinking, I should have been a good deal less self-denying and more boastful.

After dinner Margaret went with him to his room and helped him pack: which reminded me of one of my hypercivilised acquaintances doing precisely the same for her husband, each time he left her for a new girlfriend.

In the bright warm evening the three of us stood outside on the pavement, large suitcase standing beside Charles, waiting until a taxi came along. He waved to us from inside, and then we were left gazing as it joined the traffic stream to Marble Arch.

Back in the drawing-room, Margaret looked at me.

‘Well, that’s cool enough,’ she cried. She burst out into laughter, full, sisterly, sensual.

I hadn’t been sure what she was feeling: at that moment, she was feeling exactly as I was, it wasn’t just a fatherly response, she shared it. Nothing subtle, just pleasure, the warmth of sexual pleasure at second hand. Mixed with approval that he didn’t lack enterprise. But mainly we were getting what, if you wanted to be reductive, you could think of as a voyeuristic joy. That was there: but it wasn’t quite all: it wasn’t quite so self-centred as that. It wasn’t in the least lofty, though. We were animals happy about another animal. And to parental animals, the happiness was rich.

In that sense Margaret – and it surprised me a little – felt as I did. If this had been a daughter? No, there was a disparity one couldn’t escape. I was certain that I should have been miserable. Perhaps there would have been some sexual freemasonry underneath, but worry would have overwhelmed it. I supposed that would have been true, and presumably more true, of Margaret also.

After a time, in which we had taken an evening drink, Margaret became more pensive.

‘I don’t think this is going to be good for him, you know.’

‘Oh well. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been another.’ That sounded platitudinous and non-controversial, but it provoked Margaret.

‘But it is her. You can’t brush that away.’

‘He might have done worse, in some ways–’

‘I don’t like her.’

‘I’ve told you before, I don’t like her either.’

‘You like her a lot more than I do,’ said Margaret. ‘She’s a cold-hearted bitch.’

I didn’t remind Margaret that once she had been a partisan of Muriel’s and had tried to look after her.