Last Things (41 page)

‘Men have left women before, haven’t they?’ She added in a level tone: ‘He would also be leaving you.’

‘Men have left their fathers before, haven’t they?’ I replied, copying her. Then, to make amends I said: ‘But that’s different. He’s bound to do that. In fact, he’s done it already.’

‘When he came to me?’

‘Long before.’

‘Do you think he’s quite as free as that?’ Eye-glint in the expressionless face. She went on: ‘Who do we believe he’s escaping from? You think it must be me, don’t you? I rather prefer to think that it’s really you.’

I smiled. Even now, when she was speaking in earnest, her kind of subterranean impudence once or twice broke through. I said that it might not be either of us: I had come, I told her, to distrust the subjective explanations. His motive might have nothing to do with anyone but himself.

‘I don’t care why he’s doing it,’ she said sharply, ‘so long as we can keep him safe.’

‘You still haven’t told me, safe from what?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘No, what are you thinking of?’

She looked away, frowning.

‘In some ways, he’s cautious, isn’t he? He always says he’s very timid, but all that means is that he likes working things out in advance. He can be very cool, but he’s a gambler too. I think that’s what I’m afraid of. He might decide to do something sensational if he thought it was worth the risk.’

She might be right. My nerves were getting tightened in tune with hers. At the same time, I was thinking, it was strange to hear Charles, whom I assumed that I knew well, described by someone who also knew him well.

‘I wish’, she said, ‘we could find something for him that kept him away from that–’

‘What would you like him to do?’

Eye-glint again.

‘Just about the same as you would. Something nice and quiet for a few years. Like Gordon Bestwick–’ She told me that Gordon was proposing to get a job in academic life, waiting ‘in the slips’ (which of them had invented that ridiculous idiom?) to see where he might go into action. There wasn’t any doubt, she said, that some Cambridge college would soon snap him up. There wasn’t any doubt that the same would happen to Charles also, if we could persuade him to stay.

‘Well, that’s what I should like for him, to begin with. There couldn’t be anything more respectable than that, could there?’

She gazed straight at me, and went on: ‘You used to think that I wanted to get hold of him, didn’t you? Just to be useful in campaigns?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘You were quite wrong, you know. I doubt if anyone could get hold of him like that. I should never have stood a chance. No it wasn’t that. You can see it wasn’t that, can’t you?’

I nodded. ‘What is it, though?’

She replied: ‘I want him.’

After a pause, she added: ‘I wanted him before we started. I want him more now.’

She was speaking even more quietly, like a reticent neighbour at a dinner table asking one to pass the salt. At the same time, there was an undertone of something like blame – no, heavier than that – directed not at him nor me, but at herself. She wasn’t convinced, it seemed, that I believed or trusted her. She was playing for me as an ally, she hadn’t pretended anything else: now, as though the treaty were not signed and one party had to produce evidence of good faith, she was searching for something to tell me.

It was then that I heard some history. About the meetings in her house, and the undercover plans. She described the sessions in Halkin Street, which were, of course, utterly unknown to me. In fact, there wasn’t much of her story I was likely ever to have known: for neither she nor Charles would have spoken without a purpose. Ostensibly her purpose was to persuade me that she hadn’t over-influenced Charles, that in their political efforts they had been partners, and that, so far as there was influence, it had been more on his side than hers. That I couldn’t judge, though her reporting seemed as precise as his would have been. In any case, the balance of influence didn’t interest me so much. I was listening to what she was saying – whether intentionally or not, I didn’t know – about herself and Charles.

I remembered hearing Azik Schiff talking about them in his splashy exuberant domestic fashion. His stepdaughter’s taste was distinctly more austere. She did not once admit or confess that she was in love. She certainly wasn’t rejoicing at the state in which she found herself. She seemed to feel resentful, or at least not pleased with fate, at being emotionally trapped: just as another woman, starting a casual affair, might curse at another trap, that is the more primitive one of being pregnant.

The curious thing was, that about her feeling for Charles Azik had been right: right for the wrong reasons perhaps, but still right. She was in love. Myself, long before, even when I had been frustrated and wretched, I drew a kind of elation out of the state itself: other people were dull dogs, here was I, borne up in a special capsule of my own. Nothing like that was true of Muriel. If I had mentioned my own experience to her, she might have regarded it either as a sign of self-deception or alternatively as though it was as irrelevant as some reminiscence from the Languedoc courts of love.

As we gazed up the garden, lights had sprung out from other windows. Muriel’s house had the second and third floors left dark. Her voice sounded more than ever clear. None of us had been sure that we knew much about her. Was it possible, I was wondering, that she was one of those who were abnormally free of sexual guilt, and who, on the other hand, weren’t easily touched by what I called love and in my youth boasted about? So that, if they were threatened or overcome by that kind of love, they felt it as a dark and frightening force. If you took sex without guilt or any other consequences or ancillaries, were you at risk? That is, did you fear all the menace of emotion that most of us had taken as part of love? That seemed to be true of some of the old Greeks. Or the Japanese. Might it be true of this young woman, so disciplined, trying to persuade me as we sat in her garden?

It was noticeable that, when she spoke of other human relations, she wasn’t inhibited at all. Just as she had once asked me whether I loved Charles, so she spoke without any reserve about her love for her own child. As though parental love wasn’t a danger, and we could in tranquillity use the word. Well, she hadn’t yet known in full what parental love was like. Perhaps she was right though, in talking as though they were different in kind. As I had thought one night lying in the hospital bedroom, if love was the proper term for what (as I had that evening accepted) she felt for Charles, then though parental feeling could be as desperate, and could bring as great a solace, it ought to be called by a different name.

Talking of how much she loved the infant, she mentioned that Charles was very fond of him.

‘He loves children, did you know?’ she said.

She added: ‘I’d be glad to give him all he wants.’

It sounded casual, but she hadn’t said much that was casual all that evening. When I let her see that, if she was right about Charles’ intentions, then obviously I would help her if I could, she wasn’t satisfied. She couldn’t leave it alone, almost as though she were persuading, not me, but him.

WHEN the rumour spread that someone was intending to speak about the summer’s disturbances in the Lords, most of us believed it. If acquaintances eagerly brought a vaguely displeasing rumour, it usually turned out to be true. None of Charles’ group – all except Muriel were now back for the university term – appeared to be much perturbed: but Charles decided that it ought to be watched.

That was the reason that he and I, one afternoon at the end of October, were sitting in the gallery of the Lords’ Chamber. I had tried to get tickets from Francis Getliffe, but was told that he hadn’t returned to Cambridge: so I had fallen back on Walter Luke, who said that he was down to answer a question that afternoon. As soon as I looked at the order paper, I expected that it was the question Charles and I were waiting for. It was fourth and last on the list.
The Lord Catforth. To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the defence contracts alleged to be disclosed during the disturbances at — College in June had actually been placed with the college
.

It wasn’t a masterpiece of legal drafting: but the civil servants who had to write the official answer would have realised at first sight that it wasn’t innocent. I could recall similar questions arriving flagged in my in-tray in days past: and Hector Rose’s glacial and courteous contempt for all the trial shots at the answer, including, though for politeness’ sake not mentioned, the most senior, being my own.

The civil servants would have known, it was their business to know, something about the questioner. He was a backbench Labour peer, recently ennobled, who had served a long time in the Commons: a trade unionist who had made a speciality of military subjects, on which he was considerably to the right of the Tory front bench.

It was a Thursday, about five past three. High up in the gallery (there was, as mountaineering books used to say, an uncomfortable feeling of space in front of one) we looked down on a packed house. A house so packed that it might have been one of the perspectiveless collective portraits of historical Lords debates, hung in their own corridors. The scarlet and gold was swamped. Grey heads gleamed, bald heads shone: there were some very young heads also, one or two as hirsute as Guy Grenfell’s. This attendance was not, however, in honour of Catforth’s question. A debate on Southern Rhodesia was to follow later that day, and there might (or might not) be a vote. For most of those present, the preliminary questions were merely curtain-raisers or minute-wasters; to be endured, just as for parliamentarians anticlimatic business was always having to be endured.

Not so with Charles. He was leaning forward in the gallery, hands clasped round one knee. The fourth question might – it was not likely but it was possible – have its dangers. He was keyed up, but actively so, as, so I guessed, he would have been before an examination. If he could have taken part, he would have been happy.

He was also, I supposed, not put off by flummery. He and his friends were disrespectful towards English formalities, but they were used to them. A stately question number two about salmon fisheries in Scotland made him smile, but not so incredulously as if he had been a foreigner. Content changed, forms stayed, I used to think. I was no nearer knowing the answer to an old puzzle of mine, how much of the forms he and his contemporaries would leave intact.

At last the fourth question. ‘The Lord Catforth.’ A big man, with large spectacles and a black moustache, rose from the middle of the government benches, opposite to us in the gallery. ‘I beg leave to ask–’ standard formula, but not mumbled, sententiously uttered.

Walter Luke, who had been putting his feet up from the front bench, stood at the dispatch box. His hair was now steel grey, not pepper and salt, but his face had filled out in his fifties, the lines, instead of being furrows, had become undramatic creases.

In the comfortable West-Country burr, from his official file he read:

Her Majesty’s Government are aware that certain allegations were made during the June disturbances. As my honourable friend said in another place on 29 June none of these correspond to the facts as known by him. It is true that from time to time defence contracts have been placed with the college, as with many other university institutions. All such contracts are of a research nature which makes them suitable for work in university laboratories. They are placed in accordance with recognised procedures which have been used for many years, in the case of the college in question, since before 1939.

Loyal hear-hears from those near Walter. The civil servants must have calculated, I was thinking, that the wider, the better.

Lord Catforth, on his feet again:
While thanking my noble friend for that answer, it does not appear to answer the question
.

Scattered hear-hears.

Will my noble friend tell us whether any contracts of a specifically military nature relating to biological warfare have been placed with the college?

As soon as I heard that, I was sure that there had been some colloguing with Lord Catforth. Perhaps the whips had got at him. Anyway he was not the man to disapprove of any weapon either already in existence or ever to become so.

And Walter Luke was suspiciously quick in glancing at the answers to possible supplementaries with which he had been briefed.

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
I can assure the house that no contracts of a specifically military nature, either relating to biological warfare, or any other kind of weapon, have been or will be placed with the college under the present government
.

Louder hear-hears.

Someone gave voice from under the gallery whom I couldn’t see.

Does the noble lord deny that there has been a security leak? Can he estimate how valuable the information about biological warfare will be to the Russians –

Order, order.

Now I thought I recognised the voice. Man of the ultra-right. Probably attending to speak about Rhodesia.

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
As I have said to my noble friend, Lord Catforth, there has been no contract of a military nature relating to biological warfare, and so no information about biological warfare could have been or has been elicited
.

Defence spokesman from the Tory front bench, rising quickly:
Can the noble lord assure us that appropriate security precautions have been taken?

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
I can certainly give that assurance
.

The last question had been intended to be helpful. But it didn’t, as it was meant to, silence the interlocutor below.

Can the noble lord tell us how much information reaching the public press during the riots carried security classifications?

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
It would not be in the public interest to answer questions which might bear on security matters
.