Last Things (39 page)

‘I want to ask you something,’ I said curtly. ‘For practical reasons I ought to know. It’s almost certainly Charles they’re after’ (I was addressing myself to Muriel) ‘not you. So I ought to know.’ Then I spoke straight at him: ‘What have you done?’

He leant back, the whites of his eyes visible under the irises. ‘That’s not so easy to answer–’

‘That’s nonsense.’

She was coming to his help, saying, ‘No, it’s really not,’ when he sat up and faced me.

‘No,’ he said, in a level tone, ‘I don’t mind telling you, but it isn’t so easy. I don’t want to fake it either way.’

‘Well then. Did you extract those letters from the office?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not with my own hands, that is. But that’s the trouble, I don’t want to pretend that I’m not involved.’

‘How much are you involved?’

‘I knew about it before and after.’

‘But you didn’t take the letters?’

‘I’ve told you, no.’

‘You had them in your hands?’ As I asked, Muriel was shaking her head, but he wasn’t looking at her for confirmation.

‘Not that either. But I’ve seen photostats.’

That, though it was clearly true, seemed an odd piece of bureaucratisation.

‘Have you been inside those offices?’ I meant by that, those of the principal and the professors.

‘Not at the relevant times.’ (That is, when the files were ransacked.) ‘But I have been inside them, yes.’

‘So have I, so have the others,’ Muriel intervened. On the spot, that baffled me. It appeared that each of the Cambridge group had been by himself inside the college. Charles and Muriel, not together but on their own, had been smuggled in at night. Later it occurred to me that Olly might be making certain that they were committed. He had made use of them, very sensibly, as staff officers, and hadn’t wasted them as crowd fodder. As for spokesmen, he didn’t want too many public faces. But the private faces had to perform some token action: so each of them had made his visit and had, in form, taken part in the occupation. After they had told me of those incidents, so far as I could guess holding nothing back, I said: ‘That is all?’

‘That is all,’ said Charles.

‘They will know nearly everything you’ve said, either of you.’

I was talking of Monteith and his people. I emphasised that they would almost certainly know of meetings in this house and of the nocturnal visits. They would probably know that Charles was one of those who had been shown photostats. It was not impossible that they had had an informer somewhere near: it was not impossible, it was probable that they had one, though how close to the centre I couldn’t guess. It was not impossible that they knew of Charles’ staff work and of the first idea about the bw documents, but that would be very difficult to prove. On that he needn’t volunteer anything.

‘It comes to this, doesn’t it?’ Muriel was speaking, having been subdued most of the night, acting only as a support for Charles. ‘They’ll know that he’s connected, we couldn’t cover that up if we wanted to, could we? But that’s really all they’ll know and I suppose something like that applies to me.’

‘That’s the best you can expect,’ I said.

Neither of them was soft, but they were lost, and to an extent frightened because they were groping, in the security fog. I had been in my mid-thirties when, at the beginning of the war, I had my first taste of that peculiar chilling swirl. They had walked into it very early. When I mentioned that there might have been an informer among their circle, even in this house, they had looked both astonished and, unlike either of them, dismayed. They had felt an intimation of the mosaic of paranoia, the shrinking or freezing of one’s own nature, that came to any of us when overwhelmed by secrecy. You had only to feel that paranoia for a short period in your life, to live just temporarily with security, to understand what happened to conspirators once they gripped the power and then realised there might be other conspiracies, this time against themselves.

Quietly, Charles asked: ‘What is the worst we can expect?’

‘They might know effectively everything that you’ve said and done.’

‘What would that mean? For him?’ Though, as the night went on, Muriel’s eyes were becoming reddened with tiredness, they were brilliant. She had become much more aggressive than he was. She sounded, all the tricks of politeness gone, as though she were defying me.

I replied, doing my best to seem professional, that it was almost unthinkable they would prosecute. It wouldn’t be worth the publicity. Incidentally they wouldn’t like to give away their sources of information. There would, however, be entries on personal dossiers. There would be communications about Charles and his friends with persons at Cambridge. It was conceivable that one or two promising academic careers would be interrupted.

‘Do you think that will happen?’ he said.

‘Your guess is about as good as mine.’

‘If it does, you wouldn’t like it, would you?’

‘No.’

He said: ‘Nor should I.’

He had been speaking intimately, equal to equal. He didn’t ask if I understood why he had acted. He might have taken that for granted, or thought it irrelevant. He wasn’t trying to be considerate. It was knowledge, of himself and me, that he was speaking from, not emollience.

‘You know,’ he said, in genuine, unaffected surprise, ‘I didn’t think I should mind – if it came to trouble. I find that I do.’

Muriel broke in fiercely, as though rallying him, though he was much calmer than she was. It couldn’t and didn’t matter practically: nothing would break his academic career for long: anyway, it didn’t matter, he couldn’t really be touched. Anything he had ever talked of doing, was quite outside anyone else’s power.

I sat silent while she stormed at him, once or twice her gaze flashing towards me.

Charles smoothed back her hair, and said: ‘All right. All right. But some of us don’t find it quite so easy to escape from the respectable embrace, you know.’

He said it teasing her, with affection. Yet, strangely enough, though he had made remarks which sounded arrogant once or twice that night, that was the only one which struck me so.

A little later, as I was getting ready to go, he said to me, in an altogether different tone: ‘I’m sorry if all this is a trouble to you. I know it is.’

I said, taken by surprise at his naturalness, more bluff than I usually was, that there were worse things.

Muriel, brilliant with courtesy returned, said: ‘We’ve been very grateful for all your help, Uncle Lewis, you’re much too kind, aren’t you? I’m very sorry if we’re a trouble to you. I am so very sorry.’

NEXT evening, Gordon Bestwick called on me. By this time they had become obsessively careful about telephoning or any other means of communication short of physical presence: thus Charles hadn’t rung me up to report on his interview with Monteith but had sent Gordon round instead.

At least, that was the ostensible reason for the visit, but I soon found that he was consumed with worry. Perhaps Charles thought I might give him some relief.

It was hard work, either when Margaret was present or when she had made an excuse to set Gordon and me free for a walk outside. To begin with, he wouldn’t talk at all about the interview that afternoon. Whether they had resolved not to speak to unauthorised persons, and whether they had decided that Margaret was such a one, I couldn’t tell. It might have been that she still kept an air of something like privilege whereas I was nearer to the ground he knew.

If that was so, it was a classic case of misjudgment. For Margaret, used all her life to her relatives making exhibitions of themselves for conscience sake, was the least disturbed of any of us. After all, her father and his friends had received obloquy and worse through being conscientious objectors in the First World War: they had been under inspection twenty years later as premature anti-Fascists, being used as front men by the other side. They were people who had been brought up – and who had had not negligible encouragement of private means – not to give a damn.

So, though she hadn’t much patience with the students’ cause, she felt in the nature of things that spirited young men would join it. If they didn’t count the risks, well, since her marriage she had come to know so many of my colleagues who (and she had once felt this of me) counted the risks too much. Not that she didn’t count the risks for Charles: but she would have said, except when the superstitious flesh was overruling her, that she hoped he wouldn’t do so for himself.

She did her best to get Gordon talking as he sat sprawled on the sofa, great formidable head back against the cushions, at times fidgeting upwards as though he were trying to take part. The head wasn’t less formidable, but more grotesque, on account of a large acne pustule on his nose. He looked so miserable that we both forgot that he was a man probably stronger, and with the certainty of more powers to come, than either of us. We just saw him lolling there, with the lost-for-ever misery of youth. And it was a double misery. Once he roused himself and asked Margaret when she last saw Nina.

‘Last night, actually,’ said Margaret, speaking the truth, not knowing whether she should.

‘Oh.’ A hard noise. I felt a kind of pity, sentimental perhaps, for young men who had no confidence with girls.

Soon afterwards Margaret left us, and immediately I asked him what had happened yesterday. Even then he did not reply at ease. I had to say, my brother and I felt safer, discussing security affairs in the open air. Would he prefer that? When we were walking up the street towards Lancaster Gate, for the first time his voice lost its dullness.

The interrogations, he said, had lasted about an hour each: there was mention of more to follow. At intervals ‘the man’ (who had not introduced himself) interjected not as questions but as facts, statements about the examinee – ‘where I was, what I had been doing,’ Gordon told me. ‘Irrelevant, a lot of it. But they had collected stuff about me that they seemed to know better than I did.’

They had been to his school, and to people who knew his family. That was standard technique I said. It seemed strange to have it brought up now, he replied. That was standard response, everyone felt that, I said. As for what happened, both in the rising and in the plans, they knew plenty.

‘They’re leaving us guessing in spots. Whether they know or whether they’re bluffing. But they know enough to fix us. If we try to fool ourselves about that, we shall make things worse.’

Apparently one or two of the principals, though not Charles or Muriel, were still self-buoyant with optimism (the adrenalin optimism of action, perhaps; Gordon had spent last night upon them, using his bitterest and most competent tongue). As we walked along, he wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t have been foreseen. Up a side street, people were carrying their tankards outside a pub, standing on the pavement in the warm air. I asked Gordon if he would like a drink. No, he said, he wasn’t feeling much like it. He might be one of those – I could sympathise – who in trouble shied away from any sort of solace.

Except perhaps the solace of making resolutions.

‘This is a lesson for us, anyway,’ he said roughly, not looking towards me, but as though I were a companion who had to be convinced. ‘We mustn’t make the same mistake again. We tried to do two things at once, and that’s because we were too conceited. We made it all too complicated, it was my fault and Carlo’s. It seemed a good idea, but it was an infantile mistake. It mustn’t be repeated–’

He meant, and it was probably true, that without the inner plan of seizing official correspondence the rest would have been a total success. Which to the external world it had already been. Olly and his committee were getting their demands piecemeal: by the end of the summer their whole charter would have been met. But that was easy, Gordon was reflecting with harsh realism. Whatever students wanted as students would be given them on a plate. It was child’s play to make that kind of impact. But when the impact broke through a bit deeper, got right among the things which the society would hold on to like death, then the forces of resistance suddenly crept round you –

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon, ‘why do they always know when to use their blasted advantages?’

I replied, with the kind of sarcasm that I should have used to Charles, that it didn’t seem to me entirely unreasonable. You used your means of offence: established society replied with its own.

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon. ‘I hate them. I hate them and everything they stand for.’

He was not disposed either to dispassion or irony. What was right for him was wicked for the other side. That capacity for anger was a great help to him that day and might, I thought, be a strength in the future. Nearly all men of action possessed it. You had to believe the other side was a hundred per cent wrong, and preferably evil, to be a hundred per cent committed to your own. It was one of the more disagreeable facts of life. I much preferred Gordon when he was sad, trying to cope with a heavyweight temperament, mind sharp, senses rebelling: but it was his talent for anger which acted like a blood transfusion that evening, lifted him out of sadness or even fright, made one simultaneously less engaged by his company and more certain that he would survive.

It must have been shortly after that night, possibly in the same week, that he met with the rest of the inner circle on two occasions, which, according to the accounts I heard later that year, were more eventful, or at least more tense, than any of their planning sessions in Chester Row.

There had been a geographical change. These two meetings didn’t take place in Muriel’s study. The whole group had now become hypnotised by security, as we all did when it percolated round ourselves, as detestable as the smell of gas. They decided that Chester Row, and they were not necessarily wrong, was not security-proof. So they shifted the venue.

Their choice of a second meeting place seemed to bear the imprint of ingenious minds familiar with political history, possibly Gordon’s or Charles’: for, with what must have been a tinge of satisfaction, they chose a setting not likely to be kept under surveillance. That is, they chose the London house, in Halkin Street, of Guy Grenfell’s father, chairman of his local Conservative Party, Baronet (for political and public services), member of the Canton, Beefsteak, Pratts, The Turf and White’s.