Last Things (44 page)

‘Hallo, Aunt Meg!’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Hallo, Uncle Lew!’ He made a bow, ceremonious and stately, to his former wife. He shook hands with the other two, and stood in the middle of the room, brown eyes bright, vigilant and defiant, rocking springily on his heels.

‘What are you doing in London?’ I was the first to speak to him.

‘Oh, I just thought there might be a party on.’

That couldn’t be true. He knew, as well as anyone there, that the old parties had been suspended for four years past. He didn’t even bother to make the pretext plausible.

Where was his wife, Margaret asked. That was his second wife, Vicky, whom we liked much more than we liked Pat. Oh, she was in Cambridge with his father. He (Pat) would drive down and join them late that night.

‘Who else do you think is there?’ He darted the question at his cousin with the sparkle of one who held the initiative and intended to keep it.

‘How do I know?’ Charles was gruff.

‘A friend of yours.’

Charles made no response.

‘A boy called Grenfell.’

‘Is he, by God?’ Charles couldn’t keep back a flash of interest. ‘I have a tiny suspicion – of course that may just be me – but a tiny suspicion that my lady mother fancies that he might be rather a good match.’

Smiles, reluctant, wintry, but nevertheless smiles from Margaret and Muriel. Maurice, who had often defended Pat, said amiably: ‘What does Nina think?’

‘My dear sister doesn’t give a thought to such mundane things.’ Pause. ‘That doesn’t mean, though, that she won’t snaffle him.’

More shamefaced smiles. His deserts might be small, no guest had ever appeared more often uninvited, but there was no denying that he had brightened the evening. But why had he come? Not to indulge in mild malice at the expense of his family. Not even to bring out miscellaneous items of news, regardless of accuracy. Was he there simply out of inquisitiveness? Or mischief making? (In the midst of his high jinks, his eyes strayed more than once in the direction of Muriel.) More likely, I thought, it was nothing more than one of his whims.

When he had sat down, taking a chair midway between Muriel and Charles, and been given a glass of the Christmas champagne, he began telling me about my native town. For, since he had at last married Vicky, he had been living there, supported, one presumed, by Vicky’s earnings as a doctor. It was strange to have those two as my only link with that place. Particularly as Pat’s news, though it might be inaccurate, had a knack of being disconcerting. He had been seeing the Patemans, father and son. With glee he told me that they were inclined to think that I had ‘let them down’. Particularly Pateman senior. He had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a ‘man you could rely on’. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ was Mr Pateman’s considered view of my intervention in his affairs. Unless, and this was more sinister, I had my own reasons for not helping him as he patently deserved.

I cursed. When I thought of the time and trouble, and even the money, that I had spent on that man – the hours in that horrible back room of his, listening to the grating voice.

Margaret and Charles, who knew the whole story, were laughing out loud at me. They couldn’t understand how I had put up with him. I was supposed to be realistic: I had heard him speak with disapproval, rancour and hate of everyone who had helped him: and here I was, upset when I found he was doing the same about me.

While they were laughing, I noticed Pat address Muriel directly for the first time. I didn’t pick up the question, but across the room came Muriel’s clear reply.

‘Very well.’

By this time, Charles, cutting his laughter short, was attending. We all heard Pat continue:

‘How’s the new house?’

‘Doing very nicely, thank you.’

Charles put in: ‘It’s very comfortable to live in.’

If he had been older, he might have left that alone, I thought. He need not have impressed the situation upon Pat – who certainly knew, not only that Charles was living in the house, but also the exact date when he moved in.

‘I’m very very glad that’s worked, I really am.’ Pat was still speaking to Muriel, with great earnestness, as though he had been deeply concerned about the practicability of the house. Yet there was a streak of ambiguity, as if he just conceivably might not be referring to the house at all.

Muriel had been answering with unflurried coolness. I doubted whether an outsider, judging from her manner alone, could have imagined that they had ever been married. It sounded as though he might not have been inside Chester Row, though I knew he had been, at least once, to pay a dutiful visit to the baby. When he did so, his manner wouldn’t have varied, it would have been precisely as it was now.

Pat turned, like a friend of the family, to Charles.

‘How’s the work going, Carlo?’

Just as Charles had seen the beauty of Mr Pateman’s behaviour, so I saw the beauty of this. Pat had done no work either at Cambridge or the College of Art, and had been ejected from each: Charles worked like a scholar. Now Pat was enquiring with an expression of faintly worried responsibility, like an elder person concerned about an undergraduate’s progress.

‘Well enough.’ Charles sounded oddly gauche, unable to match Muriel’s style.

‘Never mind, you won’t have to stand it much longer.’

‘You needn’t worry about me.’

‘My dear Carlo, of course we do, we all do, you know that, don’t you?’

Charles muttered something. It was a long time since I had seen him at such a disadvantage. The rest of us were embarrassed – or more uneasy than that – at Pat’s display. I for one couldn’t tell whether it was effrontery for the sake of effrontery or whether there were double meanings.

‘Of course you’ll soon be going out into the great wide world, won’t you?’

‘Who knows?’ Charles tried to be casual.

‘Why shouldn’t you?’ Pat gave him a knowledgeable nudging smile. ‘We all know that there’s some money coming to you before long. After all you’ll be twenty-one in a year and a bit, isn’t it? Then you can do what you damned well please.’

Here I was taken off guard. The only persons who should have known about the trust for Charles were Margaret, the trustees, who were lawyers, Muriel, whom I had told, and Charles himself

‘You know, you can get married if you want, can’t you?’ said Pat.

Charles didn’t reply.

‘You two can get married soon, there’s nothing to stop you, is there?’

This had to stop. But neither Margaret nor I were much more effective than Charles. It was Maurice who said: ‘Don’t bother, Pat, everything will be all right, he’ll be fine.’

Whether that would have stopped Pat before, one couldn’t tell. Perhaps he had gone as far as he intended. He went on with minor semi-affectionate jabs at Charles, but nothing outrageous. Among those who were listening, there was one curious feature. Muriel was not taut; she wasn’t even cool or blank-faced: she was smiling, like one who, used to this kind of scene, was ready to laugh it off.

Not so much later, Diana, who could have thought that the attention had faded from her, announced to Maurice that she wanted to go to bed. Seizing on the excuse, I was on my feet. I heard Pat talking to Muriel and Charles. He could drive them to Chester Row. It would be no trouble, he wouldn’t get to Cambridge anyway until the early morning. It was clear that he intended to go into the house with them, as though nothing ought to be allowed to separate the trio.

When we were in our bedroom, door shut, safe by ourselves, Margaret sat on the bed and exclaimed: ‘God, what a night.’

I said I’d had more than enough of Christmas Eves.

‘I take it’, said Margaret, ‘that nephew of yours is trying to break up their marriage?’

‘It looks like it,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘He might be after her again himself. It might be sheer devilry.’

‘If it wasn’t for Martin,’ she said, ‘I’d get rid of him for good.’

She looked reflective, and went on: ‘Once, you know, I’d have been glad for anyone, even if it was that little snake, to get Carlo out of her hands.’

She added: ‘I don’t know, now I sometimes think I’m getting reconciled to her.’

Before we went to sleep, after we had talked over Maurice and his wife, soothing ourselves with the inquest, Margaret said: ‘I wonder if any single one of us got what he wanted tonight?’

AFTER Christmas we did not see Maurice again, and Charles only for an hour or two, during the rest of the winter. Letters from Maurice were, however, arriving often, and untypically they were businesslike letters; for, to my surprise if no one else’s, Margaret had got her way, and Maurice and his wife were moving to London after Easter, well before the child was due. Whether this was a success for Charles’ persuasive powers, none of us could tell: but certainly he not only cajoled Diana on Christmas Eve, but had persisted, spending a weekend with them in Manchester to do so.

There was also another kind of cajolery going on. Pat, so we heard, had been seen with Charles in Cambridge, and Muriel told me, as a matter of fact, without explanation, that he had called on her twice when she was alone. She said nothing more, but it had all the appearance of a deliberate campaign. With labile characters such as Pat, the line was precarious (as I had learned with bitterness much earlier in my life) between being a busybody and being destructive for destructiveness’ sake.

In January, I had heard something which made our family seem lucky. For some reason that went out of mind, I had been dining by myself at the Athenaeum. Towards the end of my meal, I was staring out of the window at the reflection of the table lights, when someone close by uttered my name. It was Leonard Getliffe.

‘I’m very glad to see you, Lewis. I was going to ring you up.’

I asked him to help me finish the wine, which he wouldn’t: he sat down on the opposite side of the table.

‘I wanted to tell you about my father,’ he said.

His clever conceptualiser’s face looked cheerful, and at the sight of him I felt so myself.

‘He’s been ill. Oh, it’s coming out all right, we’re all delighted. But it’s important that the news shouldn’t get around.’

I said that I had had some practice in guarding the news of illnesses, including my own.

‘We thought of telling you when it happened. Three or four months ago. But we decided that the possibility of leakage was directly proportional to the number of people who knew.’

That might be statistically true, I was thinking. It was also somewhat bleak to tell to a man’s oldest friend. But Leonard wasn’t really being bleak, he was indulging in what his colleagues called cat-humour.

Francis hadn’t been specially well all the summer.

At Viredoux (that was the house in Provence) he’d been coughing a lot, but he said it was bronchitis. He used to have it in Cambridge, you know, that was one of the reasons for taking a
pied-à-terre
somewhere else.

Leonard went on: ‘Well, he wasn’t feeling quite up to coming back at the beginning of last term. So Katherine persuaded him, he’d always hated the idea of doctors of course, to go and let them look him over in Nîmes.’

‘Yes?’

‘They found he had a spot on one lung. They operated at once, very skilfully, Francis says. He has a lot of use for their experimental technique. It was perfectly successful. He’s convalescing down there now. It’ll be a bit of time before he’s back to optimum form, but he’s remarkably well. His morale is very high and he’s fretting about not being back at the lab. He’s feeling stronger every day. We’re all extremely pleased with him. I think we were more worried than he was, but that’s gone now. We want to get him back in Cambridge by April. He’s very eager to see you, by the by.’

I tried to show no sign of disbelief as I gazed into the intelligent innocent face. From the moment he mentioned the operation, I had been horrified. Perhaps, I wanted to think, old anxieties were running away with me, Leonard might be right, Francis was not a self-deceiver.

I could not shift my own mood for an instant. I found Leonard’s euphoria dismaying, and anything he said of Francis’. After a few flat questions – I did not want to puncture Leonard’s well-being, but I could not, for premonition’s sake, not honesty’s – give any expression of pleasure or relief – I made an excuse, and went home.

As soon as I arrived there, I telephoned Charles March. Since old Mr March’s death, Charles had been reconciled to his sister and her husband, but it was the kind of reconciliation in which the years of difference were covered up, not eliminated or transformed. Still, he might have heard from them.

When I asked, that turned out to be true. What did he think, as a doctor?

There was a long pause at the other end. ‘I haven’t enough to go on, I haven’t even seen him. One’s opinion isn’t much use–’

Charles was growing more hesitant as he passed into his sixties. The fire and devil of his youth – and the unfairness – did not often show. He was more inclined to speak like a responsible citizen who didn’t want to be quoted.

‘No, but what is it? I want to know what you think, that’s all.’

Another long pause.

‘If it were you or me, I doubt if we should be as optimistic as they are.’

‘No.’

‘Mind, sometimes these operations really work.’ Charles mentioned some cases of cancer which he had seen.

‘How would you put his chances?’

He refused to make a guess. Then he said: ‘If what you’re afraid of did happen – and you know I’m as afraid of it as you are – then I’m terribly worried for Katherine. She loves her children, but he’s been her whole life.’

That same night, I wrote to her, carefully casual, saying I had just seen Leonard and was hoping that all continued well. A reply came about a fortnight later, from Francis himself, as euphoric as Leonard’s report had been. Of course, he couldn’t expect to get all his strength back overnight; it would take months rather than weeks; but they would expect Margaret and me in Cambridge in the summer. With a blend of invalid concentration and scientific interest, he enclosed a sketch of the original X-ray of his lungs, and a diagram showing how the surgeons had operated.