Last Things (6 page)

One of the new ministers, from a table close by, was engaging Francis in earnest, low-voiced conversation. So, getting on with my first drink, I gazed from our corner into the room. It wasn’t altogether novel to me: when Francis was in London, I sometimes met him there: but my first visit had been much further back, in the thirties, when I had been invited by an acquaintance called Lord Boscastle. So far as I could trust my memory, it had been different then. Surely there had been less people, both in the chamber and round this room? Somewhat to his surprise, Lord Boscastle’s first speech for twenty years had not been much of a draw.

Had the place really been socially grander, or was that a young man’s impression? I remembered noticing, even in the thirties, that there were not many historic titles knocking about. Lord Boscastle, who bore one and was a superlative snob, had once remarked, with obscure and lugubrious satisfaction, that the House was quintessentially middle-class. Well, that night, there were still three or four historic titles on view. One of them was sitting at the bar, with a depressed stare, imbibing gin. There was another, at a table surrounded by his daughters: my maternal grandfather had been a gamekeeper on his grandfather’s estate. A number, though, had come up from the Commons, or their nineteenth-century ancestors had; some had been successes in politics, some had missed the high places, and some had never hoped for much. There were several life peers, as Francis was, and some women. Round the room one could hear a variety of accents: about as many as in the Athenaeum, which was a meritocratic club, and a good deal more than in the other club I sometimes used.

Most of these people might have seemed strange to their predecessors in the Lords a hundred years before. No doubt the professional politicians (and there had been plenty of professional politicians there in the nineteenth century, even if, like Palliser, they were landed magnates too) would have found plenty to talk about to the modern front-benchers: there was no tighter trade union in England, then or now. But still, it was like our college, Francis’ and mine. The fabric of the building hadn’t altered: the survival of politeness in which Francis had been indulging in the Chamber, that hadn’t altered either, not by a word. The forms remained the same, while the contents changed. It had perhaps been a strength sometimes, this national passion for clinging on to forms, nostalgic, pious, warthog obstinate. Alternatively, it could have released our energies if we had cut them away. And yet, for this country that had never been on, there had never been a realistic chance. Bend the forms, make them stretch, use them for purposes quite different from those in which they had grown up: that had been the way we found it natural (the pressures were so mild we didn’t feel them, as mild as the soft English weather) to work. Sometimes I wondered whether my son and his contemporaries would find it natural too.

I mentioned as much to Francis that night. I had recently heard from Charles, and so could think about him at ease. His was a generation that to Francis, whose children were older, seemed like strangers.

The loudspeaker boomed out – ‘Defence debate. Speaking, the Lord–’ Within two minutes of this news, the population flowing into the guest room had markedly increased. Among the deserters was Lord Ampleforth, pushing his way towards the bar, heavy shoulders hunched. Glancing across to our corner, he nodded to Francis, a flashing-eyed, recognitory nod, as from one power to another. Francis called out: ‘Interesting speech, Josh.’

We watched Josh acquire his whisky, and glance round the room.

‘Looking for someone useful,’ Francis quietly commented. Apparently, whatever Josh was in search of, he didn’t find it. He swallowed his drink at speed, gave another flashing-eyed nod to Francis, patted two men on their shoulders, and went out, presumably back to the Chamber, even though Lord – was still up.

Francis, settling back in his chair by the window, did not feel obliged to follow. He was comfortable, ready to sit out the next few speeches, until out of courtesy he returned for the end of the debate. If it hadn’t been for his own choice, he wouldn’t have been as free as that; he would have been on the front bench, waiting to wind up for the government. For, the weekend after the election, he had had an offer. Would he become a minister of state? To take charge of the nuclear negotiations? He had told me before he replied, but he wasn’t asking for advice. He had said no.

There was one objective reason. He knew, just as I knew, without the aid of Azik’s benevolent instruction, how little a minister could do. The limits of free action were cripplingly tight, tighter than seemed real to anyone who had not been inside this game. We had both watched, been associated with, and gone down alongside a Tory minister, Roger Quaife, who had tried to do what Francis would have had to try. And Quaife had been far more powerful than Francis could conceivably be. The limits of freedom for this government would be much less than for the last. Francis would fail, anyone would fail. He had done a good deal in the line of duty – but this, he said bleakly, was a hiding to nothing. If he had asked my opinion, I should have agreed.

But that wasn’t all. He had been an influence for so long. He had been criticised, at times in disfavour, privately defamed – but always, like other eminent scientists called in to give advice, covered by a kind of mantle of respect. That closed and secret politics was different from politics in the open. Francis hadn’t been brought up in open politics. At sixty-one (he was two years older than I was) his imagination and thin skin told him what it would be like. Francis had plenty of courage, but it was courage of the will.

But that was not all either, or even most of it. His major reason for saying no, almost without a thought, was much simpler. It was just that he had become very happy. This hadn’t always been so. His marriage – that had been good from the beginning. If he hadn’t been lucky there, if he hadn’t had the refuge of his wife and children, I had sometimes thought, he would have broken down. Even now, though his face looked younger than his age, his hair still dark, carefully trimmed on the forehead, by a streak of vanity, to conceal that he hadn’t much dome on the top of his fine El Greco features, he bore lines of strain and effort, bruiselike pouches left by old anxiety under his eyes. For many years his creative work hadn’t gone well enough, according to the standards he set himself. Then at last that had come right. In his fifties he became more serene than most men. To those who first met him at that time, it might have seemed that he was happy by nature. To me, who had known him since we were very young, it seemed like a gift of grace. His home in Cambridge, his laboratory, where, since he was a born father, the research students loved him as his children did, his own work – what could anyone want more? He just wished to continue in the flow of life. Yes, in the flow there were the concerns of anyone who felt at all: his friends’ troubles, illnesses, deaths, his children’s lives. His eldest son, more gifted than Francis himself, was eating his heart out for a woman who couldn’t love him; his favourite daughter, in America, was threatening a divorce. He took those concerns more deeply just because he felt so lucky and thus had energy to spare. That was the flow, all he wanted was for it to stretch ahead: he wasn’t going to break out of it now.

So he had refused. Some blamed him, thinking him overproud or even lacking in duty. The job had gone to an old wheel-horse of the party, who was given it for services rendered. ‘He won’t last long,’ said Francis that night, ruminating on politics after the departure of Josh. ‘There’s talk that they may want to rope you in. Well, you’ve always had to do the dirty work, haven’t you?’

He grinned. He had spoken quite lightly, and I didn’t pay much attention. I should have asked a question, but we were interrupted by acquaintances of Francis enquiring if they might join us, and bringing up their chairs. Two of them were new members on his own side, the other a bright youngish Tory. They were all eager to listen to him, I noticed. He was relaxed and willing to oblige. But what they listened to would have puzzled those who had known him only in his stiffer form, fair-minded and reticent in the college combination room.

For Francis was giving his opinions about the people who had worked on the atomic bomb. His opinions weren’t at all muffled, he wasn’t bending over backwards to be just: he had an eye for human frailty and it was sparkling now. ‘Anyone who thinks that Robert Oppenheimer was a liberal hero might as well think that I’m a pillar of the Christian faith.’

‘
X
(an Englishman) never had an idea in his head. That’s why he gave everyone so much confidence.’

‘
Y
(an American) is an anti-Semitic Jew who only tolerates other Jews because the Russians don’t.’

Some of Francis’ stories were new to me. Several of his characters I had met. I had thought before, and did so again that evening, that since he became content he had shown it differently from most other men. A good many, when they had been lucky, felt considerable warmth and approval for others who had been lucky too. Somehow it added to their own deserts. Well, Francis was not entirely above this feeling: but more and more he felt a kind of irreverence, or rather gave his natural irreverence, carefully concealed during his years of strain, its head. Buttoned up, stuffed, deliberately fair – so he had seemed to most people when he thought that he mightn’t justify himself. His wife Katherine knew him otherwise; so did his children; so did I, and one or two others. But with everyone else he was determined not to show envy, not even to let his tongue rip, at the expense of those who were enjoying what he so much longed for. Those who did better creative work than his had to be spoken about with exaggerated charity. It made him seem maddeningly judicious, or too good to be true. He wasn’t. As he became happy, he became at the same time more benign and more sardonic. I didn’t remember seeing that particular change in anyone else before.

He was talking about David Rubin. Yes, he was one of the best physicists alive, he was a better man than most of them. It wasn’t decent for anyone to be so clever. But the trouble with Rubin, Francis said, was that he enjoyed being proved right more than doing anything useful. He had never believed that any of us could do anything useful. If he knew that we were all going to blow ourselves up in three hours’ time, David would say that that had always been predictable and remind us that he had in fact predicted it.

I was enjoying myself, but I had to leave. As I retraced my way over the red carpets, I was hoping for a glimpse of Sammikins, just to ask how he was. I had an affection for him: he was a wild animal, brave but lost. He hadn’t come into the guest room for a drink, which was strange enough. I wanted to glance into the Chamber, to see if he was still sitting there, but an attendant reminded me that that wasn’t allowed, guests had to pass without lingering on to the red carpet on the other side.

MARGARET had had her suspicions for some time, but they were not confirmed until the evening of Hector Rose’s dinner party. She and I had arranged to meet in a Pimlico pub, because she was coming on from Muriel Eliot’s flat and Rose (among the other unexpected features of his letter) had given an address in St George’s Drive. As soon as Margaret arrived, I didn’t need telling that she was distressed – no, not brooding, but active and angry. Her colour was high, her eyes brilliant, and when I said, ‘Something the matter,’ it was not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

She looked at me, seemed about to break out, then suddenly smiled.

‘No. Not yet. Not here.’

Her tone was intimate. We both understood, she didn’t want to spoil the next few minutes. It wasn’t just an accident that we were meeting in this pub. The place had memories for each of us, but not particularly pleasant ones, certainly not unshadowed ones. We used to drink there, early in the war, when I was living in Dolphin Square, close by: right at the beginning of our relation, long before we married, when we were already in love but in doubt whether we should come through. Sitting there now, more than twenty years later, or walking round the corner to the square, we felt as we had done before, the Dantesque emotion in reverse. No greater misery, he said, than to recall a happy time in sadness: turn that the other way round. At some points our sentimentalities were different, but here they were the same. The scenes of the choked and knotted past – if we had any reasonable pretext, as on that night, we went and looked at them with our present eyes.

Margaret had asked for bitter, which she rarely drank nowadays. The pub was humming with background music, in the corner lights on a pin-table flashed in and out, all new since our time. But then we had not noticed much, except ourselves.

She gazed round, and smiled again. She said: ‘Well, what’s it going to be like tonight?’

We hadn’t the vestige of an idea. The week before I had received a letter in a beautiful italic hand that once had been so familiar, when I used to read those minutes of Rose’s, lucid as the holograph itself. The letter read:

My dear Lewis, It is a long time since I said goodbye to you as a colleague, but I have kept in touch with your activities from a distance. When I read your work, I feel that I know you better than during our period together in the service: that gives me much regret. It is unlikely that you could have heard, but I have recently remarried. It would give us both much pleasure if you and your wife could spare us an evening to come to dinner. [There followed some dates to choose from.] I have retired from all public activities, and so you will be doing a kindness if you can manage to come.

Yours very sincerely,

Hector Rose

In the years when I had worked under Rose in Whitehall, and they were getting on for twenty, I had never met his wife. It was known that he lived right at the fringe of Highgate: when he entertained, which wasn’t often, he did so at the Athenaeum: there was no mention of children: he kept his private life locked up, as though it were a state secret. Underneath his polite, his blindingly polite manners, he was a forbidding man, in the sense that no one could come close. He was as tough-minded as any of the civil-service bosses, and I came to admire his sheer ability more, the longer I knew him. But that facade, those elaborate manners – they were so untiring, so self-invented, often so ridiculous, that one felt as though one were stripping off each onion-skin and being confronted by a precisely similar onion-skin underneath. There were those who thought he must be homosexual. I couldn’t have guessed. By this time he was sixty-six, and reading his letter Margaret and I decided that he must have married a second time for company (I remembered reading a bare notice of the death of the first wife, with the single piece of information that she, like Rose himself, had been the child of a clergyman). Otherwise, the only inference we could draw came from his last sentence. Rose used words carefully, as a master of impersonal draftsmanship, and that sounded remarkably like a plea. If so, it was the only plea I had ever known him make. He was the least comfortable of companions, but no one was freer from self-pity.