Last Things (35 page)

Then Muriel gazed along the table towards Charles.

‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘will you bring the others up when you’re ready?’

‘Of course,’ said Charles.

Margaret gave me a stupefied glance before she went with the other two women out of the dining-room. Now I felt sure that this evening must have been prepared for, though it seemed due more to Muriel’s sense of – humour? mischief? even impudence? than to Charles’. He might have thought up a charade, but he wouldn’t have carried it so far. He might have considered that last touch inartistic. He knew as well as anyone there that Margaret and I had never separated men from women after dinner since we set up house. Nevertheless, still grave and decorous, he apologised to Azik and me for not being able to offer us port; could we make do with brandy?

Until we left, I didn’t hear an intimate word spoken. Chat when the party re-formed in the drawing-room, Charles having kept us below for a precise fifteen minutes. Chat admirably tailored for a dinner party in a remote diplomatic mission, third secretary and wife doing their duty by elderly compatriots. Once Rosalind asked her daughter: ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ – where the ‘you’ was intended to be in the singular.

‘Oh,’ said Muriel, ‘we shall have a quiet time, I expect; we shan’t be going away.’ She contrived to make their ménage sound remarkably like the end of
Little Dorrit
. Occasionally their eyes met. Otherwise they behaved, not only as though they were safely married, but as though they had been so for a long time.

Glances at watches. Goodbyes. Margaret unusually effusive with thanks for a delightful evening. Ritual of gratitude. Ritual of kisses. Margaret and I back home by eleven o’clock.

The departure of their guests so early might have suggested to Muriel and Charles that the party had not been an uproarious success. Presumably that wasn’t weighing on their spirits. And yet, as with so many of Muriel’s father’s exploits, there was a faint, an almost imperceptible doubt. It was a thousand to one against – but what if they had been serious? What if they had been to obsessive trouble and given their first dinner party?

In that case, said Margaret, tender to the embarrassments of the young, it would have been a major disappointment. She didn’t believe it: but she didn’t utterly and absolutely disbelieve it. I laughed at her, and wasn’t unaffected myself. Muriel had a gift for disquiet, I thought: that is, she stayed still and here were we, more mystified about them both than we had been before.

We were not the only people who were mystified that night. Two days later, on the Monday afternoon, Azik’s secretary telephoned me. Mr Schiff would be very grateful if I could spare him a few minutes. When? Straight away, if I could manage it: otherwise – Yes, I was doing nothing, I said, I would come round. Mr Schiff will send a car for you. That wasn’t necessary. Oh, Mr Schiff insists –

Mr Schiff did insist, just as Lord Lufkin used to, and as in Lord Lufkin’s time I was driven in a Daimler to the office. Driven in state for something like eight hundred yards. For Azik, like other tycoons, had moved his office westwards, into the Park Lane fringe of Mayfair, and now inhabited a mansion which in the nineteenth century had been the town house of a Whig grandee. All, including the car, was as sumptuous as Lord Lufkin’s accoutrements used to be: thick carpets on the office floors, Regency decorations restored, regilded. There was just one difference. Of these two, Azik was by far the more outpouring: which wasn’t saying much, since very few men were less outpouring than Lufkin. In fact, Azik was lavish by any standard, his tastes were exuberant, as witness his house in Eaton Square. Yet Lufkin’s personal office had reminded one of the Palazzo Venezia in one of the Duce’s more expansionist phases: whereas Azik’s office in Hertford Street, which I had not visited before that day, must have been something like a closet or at best a dressing-room in the old mansion, much smaller, darker, more shut in than the room of his own secretary, and, apart from a desk and a couple of chairs, almost totally unequipped.

There were no offers of tea, drinks, or even cigarettes. Azik did all his hospitality at home. He shook my hand, and immediately asked: ‘I wanted to hear, what do you think of our young friends?’

‘I suppose you knew about them?’

I meant, did he know, before Saturday night, that they were living together. Azik laid a finger to the side of his nose.

‘My dear Lewis, what do you take me for?’

As a matter of historical fact, it had not required superhuman acumen or any other quality with which I was willing to credit Azik. Muriel had, for some purpose of her own, first raised her mother’s suspicions and then, after various misdirections, had gone into a fit of apparent absent-mindedness and told her.

‘They have presented us with a
fait accompli
, I should say,’ Azik put it like a question. ‘I don’t understand why they wish to remind us of it, do you?’

That was only one of the things I didn’t understand, I said. Including the whole situation.

Azik nodded.

‘The only certain feature of that situation is that it won’t stand still.’ He went on, he’d never known a situation with a woman which did stand still, until he married Rosalind: and not always then. He spoke with a shamefaced smile, not so unquenchably the hypermasculine or the Jewish papa.

Then he said: ‘Your son is a lucky young man, shouldn’t you say?’

‘Is he?’

‘He loves her, of course. He’d be very hard to please if he didn’t. Believe me, I know more about the girl than you do. He’s very lucky to love and find everything teed up. We didn’t have so much luck, you and I, my friend.’

I said yes. I was thinking – me at Charles’ age, walking the town streets, virgin, craving, about to fall in love without return. As for Azik at that age, I knew nothing: it must have been about the end of Weimar, he might perhaps have been wondering whether he would have the chance, not to love, but simply to live.

‘Well then,’ said Azik. ‘It would be more of a blow to him if she dropped him. And if you’ll listen to me, I have to assure you, that might happen.’

I had a sudden sense of affront, that he should suggest Charles was going to be ill-treated in love. If he said it about me, well and good – so that I was more offhand than I need have been, when I replied: ‘It has happened to better men than him.’ I went on: ‘But I’ve seen no sign of it. Have you? Have you heard anything?’

Azik slowly shook his great head. There was a long pause, as though he were hesitating whether to speak or alternatively was reorganising his case. With the apologetic air of one putting a probing amendment, he said: ‘How would you regard it if they got married?’ I wasn’t prepared. I blurted out: ‘He’s far too young–’

‘As far as that goes, he is grown up. He has grown up very fast. But I didn’t mean now, my friend. Not yet. Not yet.’

‘I haven’t given it a thought.’ That wasn’t true. It had passed through my mind as a possibility, one that seemed unlikely and that I didn’t like.

‘Perhaps you might some day.’ He gave me a cheerful, watchful, evaluating glance. Another pause. ‘I should say, there would be no objection from our side. My side.’ (Was that a correction? Did Rosalind, as I could well believe, disagree with him? Was that why we were meeting in his office?) ‘There would be no objection. No, I should welcome it.’

‘Oh well, there’s no hurry,’ I said, playing for time.

‘I want her to have a good life. She mustn’t make another mistake. That was a disaster, the last one. But this time she has chosen something worth while.’ He broke into a grin.

‘I must say, she is making a habit of being covered by members of your family.’ He had been speaking of his stepdaughter with genuine fondness, something like the affection of the flesh: he was still doing so, though I hadn’t expected that last remark.

He went on: ‘I couldn’t have chosen better for her if she’d asked me, this time. You have a fine boy there.’

‘So have you with yours.’ That was tactical. I wanted to break the conversation up.

‘We have both been luckier than we deserve. Oh yes, David will give me something to live for when I’m an old man. And your Charles is a blessing too.’ The mention of his son hadn’t distracted him for long. He said: ‘You needn’t wonder why my girl is in love with him.’

‘I don’t wonder. I doubt it. I don’t know.’

‘I tell you, Lewis, I do know. I know her. She puts on a front, she wears a mask, she drives you mad. But she feels without anyone seeing. I know. I know because she used to feel for me. She is in love with him.’

This was the direct opposite of anything that Margaret or I had thought. How much did Azik believe it? He was out to persuade me, he did it with fervour. Of course, he was set on making some sort of bargain – though he must have known that I hadn’t any control over Charles. Perhaps he wanted something quite simple, such as that I shouldn’t use my influence against the marriage, if I were asked. He was pressing her claims, softening me by insisting (he could have known no more than I did, I thought) that she was in love.

‘We’d better leave it to them, hadn’t we?’ I said.

‘Tell me, Lewis. We are good enough friends to say anything, I should think. Why are you against her?’

‘Wait a minute. Haven’t you something to explain to me? Not very long ago you were warning me that she might drop him. Now you’re talking about serious love. You can’t have it both ways–’

He didn’t blink, he gave his wide-lipped froglike smile.

‘Oh yes I can. You see, she has been bitten once. If she feels in danger now, if she’s getting in too deep, and doesn’t see marriage at the end, then she would pull out and save herself. She won’t risk another fiasco. If she thought that was happening she’d be capable of cutting her losses. And breaking both their hearts in the process.’

That was altogether too elaborate, I said. When I was young, I invented some labyrinthine explanations for the way I behaved with Sheila. I shouldn’t trust them now. I had come to be suspicious, more than suspicious, of second-order emotions and motives.

Azik shrugged.

‘If they come apart, you may have to see who did it.’ He broke off: ‘But you haven’t told me. Why are you against her?’

What I said wasn’t all I felt. I was afraid, I was speaking without much emphasis, that if he married young she might confine him.

‘What do you mean, confine him?’

‘She won’t alter. She’s set by now–’

‘Are you saying her opinions are set? And that young man is going to adopt them? God in Heaven, Lewis, do you know your own son?’

‘Not quite that. No, they might confine each other. They both happen to have a passion for politics.’ (Did he know that about his stepdaughter?) ‘That might restrict them, they might never get out of the groove–’

‘Politics shmolitics,’ said Azik, who encouraged, irrespective of merit, anything which Gentiles accepted as Jewish jokes.

The meeting, which seemed to have been disappointing for him and was disconcerting for me, ebbed towards, not a conclusion, but an end.

WE shall have a quiet time, I expect,’ Muriel had said in her own drawing-room, when asked about their plans for Christmas. She might have expected it, if she were less shrewd than any of us imagined: what was certain is that she didn’t get it.

Otherwise there was not much one could be certain about. What happened to them in the winter of 1966–7, no one knew in detail but themselves. I received a partial account some time afterwards, from, I kept thinking, the one source I shouldn’t have contemplated. Much of it seemed honest: but it had the disadvantages of all accounts which were given with hindsight. However, some of it I could check against events which I observed for myself. Like most bits of second-hand history, it left one dissatisfied, possibly both too credulous and too sceptical.

Still, that account was all that I had to work on. Later, I sometimes wondered what I should have said if I had had information at the time. Certainly, that they were expecting too much, that they had fallen into the occupational disease, for politicians of any age, of over-optimism. So that they sometimes seemed romantic, if not silly. But if I had known it all I should also have admitted, perhaps only to myself, that some of them were capable. They would sit in my contemporaries’ chairs soon enough, or perhaps in different chairs which they had constructed for themselves.

To begin with, it seemed – and there was nothing surprising here – that during the Christmas period and the New Year they were preoccupied with, or at least spent much of their time upon, what was now in private jargon called ‘the movement’. But they were preoccupied in a complex and sometimes ambiguous fashion. They were taking part in plans for the movement’s operations: the interesting thing was, they and their intimates, including Bestwick, had plans within plans, and these often, for security’s sake, had to be concealed.

Not that they were unrealistic or undisciplined. It was their own choice to join, as very much the junior partners, with a core of London students. A London college was to be the point of action. The Cambridge group hadn’t much to offer, except as a token of goodwill, rather like a contingent of New Zealanders being attached to American forces. They found a leader whom they would in any case have had to accept: but who in fact had a quality none of them possessed or had come across before. He was already a national figure and was to become more so. I did not meet him until much later, and then only casually: but like most other people I was soon used to seeing his face on television and hearing him talk. His name was Olorenshaw. The television interviewers and commentators called him by his Christian name of Antony, or, when they knew him less well, Tony. However, that was something like affable ministers strolling through the smoking-room and addressing backbenchers by the wrong first name. All Olorenshaw’s friends and comrades called him nothing else but ‘Olly’, following a good old lower-class habit, much in use among professional games players. Olly actually was a goodish cricketer, and had played in the Bradford League. His father was a journalist on the
Yorkshire Post
, and Olly had been brought up in modest comfort. He was a muscular, shortish, low-slung young man, with a snub-nosed face that one wouldn’t have noticed in a crowd.