Last Things (8 page)

‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you’ll feel different when Carlo (our name for Charles) is back.’

‘What will he be like then?’ she said.

She asked, would he understand the situation of Pat and Muriel better than we did. Neither of us could guess. It was hard to believe that he had much in common with either.

ON the afternoon of Christmas Day, Margaret and I were sitting in our drawing-room, along with Maurice, who had the day off from his hospital. Over the Park outside, the sky was low, unbroken: no rain, not cold, a kind of limbo of a December day. We had put off the Christmas meal until the evening, since my brother Martin and his wife and daughter were driving down from Cambridge. No newspapers, no letters, a timeless day. I suggested that we should go for a walk: Margaret looked at the cloud cover, and decided that it wasn’t inviting. Maurice, as usual glad to oblige, said that he would come with me.

We didn’t go into Hyde Park, but instead turned into the maze of streets between our flat and Paddington. Or rather I turned that way, for Maurice didn’t assert himself, and happily took what came. It wasn’t that he was a weak character: in his own fashion, he was a strong one; but it was a fashion so different from mine, or my own son’s, that I was no nearer knowing what he wanted, or where his life would go. Since he came to me, at the age of three, when I married Margaret, he and I had always got on well: there hadn’t been the subliminal conflict of egos that had occasionally broken out in my relation, on the surface ironic and amiable, with young Charles. Sometimes it seemed that Maurice didn’t have an ego. I had been concerned, because it made Margaret anxious, about his examination failures. I had also been concerned, because I was enough of a bourgeois born, about whether he would ever earn a living. Which had a certain practical interest, since otherwise I should have to go on supporting him.

He walked at my side, face innocent, good-looking, not feminine but unhardened for twenty-one. As usual, he was unprickly free from self: yet, I had often wondered, was that really true? It was the puzzle that one sometimes met in people who asked very little for themselves. They cared for others: they did good works and got nothing and claimed nothing: they had no rapacity or cruelty: so far as human beings could be, they were kind. Nevertheless, occasionally one felt – at least I did – that underneath they had a core more impregnable than most of ours. Somehow they were protected. Protected as some men are by shields of vanity or self-regard. Certainly Maurice made one feel that he was in less danger than any of us. Maybe it was that, more than his kindness, which made him so comfortable to be with.

Under the monotone sky, the high houses, also monotone, similar in period to the one where the Roses were living, more run-down. In the square, neon signs of lodging houses. Church built when the square was opulent (a million domestic servants in London then, and the slum-poor nowhere near these parts), Christmas trees lit up outside. Sleazy cafés on the road to Paddington station. A few people walking about, slowly, in the mild gloom. A scrum of West Indians arguing on the pavement. Christmas decorations in closed shops. Here and there on the high house-fronts lighted windows.

Once or twice Maurice reminded me of stories which he had told about those streets, for he knew them well. In his holidays he used to join a friend of his, the vicar of a local parish, on pastoral visits, making a curious, unsolemn and faintly comic pair, the vicar stout, be-cassocked and birettaed, Maurice as thin as a combination of the idiot prince and a first-class high-jumper. It was their way of enjoying themselves, and they had been inside many more rooms in the Paddington hinterland than the vicar’s duty called for. Yes, some of the sights weren’t pretty, Maurice had reported, unshockable: you could find most kinds of vice without going far. Also most kinds of suffering. Not the mass poverty of the thirties, that had been wiped out. But alcoholic’s poverty, drug addict’s poverty, pensioner’s poverty. Being poor when you’re old, though, that’s not the worst of it, Maurice had said. It’s being alone, day after day, with nothing to look forward to until you die. For once (it had happened one night when he returned home, a couple of years before), Maurice had spoken with something like violence. Genteel poverty behind lace curtains. A lucky person had a television set. If anyone feels like being superior about television, when they’re old they ought to live alone without one. You know, Maurice had gone on, they look forward to seeing Godfrey (the vicar) and me. I suppose one would if one were alone. Of course we can’t do much. We can just stay talking for half an hour. Anyway, Godfrey isn’t much good at conversation. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

As we walked along, solitary figures passing us in the empty streets, lighted windows in the houses, I was thinking, he had been behind some of those windows. They weren’t as taunting when one got inside as when one gazed at them from the street as a young man. For an instant, I was, not precisely remembering, but touched by a residual longing from, other Christmas days long past, when I had also gone out for walks on deserted pavements, just to kill time, just to get through the day. That had been so in the provincial town, after my mother died: slipping out after Christmas dinner, necessarily teetotal, at Aunt Milly’s, I used to tramp the streets as the afternoon darkened, gazing up garden paths at bright and curtained sitting-rooms, feeling a kind of arrogant envy. That had been so again, my first year in London: my friends all at home, no George Passant to pass the evening with, and I with nothing to do. The streets must have looked much as they did that day with Maurice, but that I had forgotten or repressed, and where I finished up the night.

‘Not exactly cheerful,’ I said, as though commenting on the present situation, indicating a young man who was dawdling past us.

‘Poor old thing,’ said Maurice, who really was commenting on the present situation. ‘He doesn’t look as if he’s got anywhere to go–’

For any connoisseur of townscapes, that afternoon’s had its own merit. The unvaried sky lay a thousand feet above the houses: the great city stretched all round one, but there was no sense of space: sky, houses, fairy lights on Christmas trees all pressed upon the lost pedestrians in the streets. Yes, the townscape had its own singular merit, but it was good to be back (did Maurice feel this too?) among the lights of our own drawing-room, able to find our own enclave.

To be realistic, it was not quite such a well-constructed enclave as it might have been. At least, not when we sat down to dinner. Physically all was well. The food was good, there was plenty to drink. But in Margaret, and in me watching her, the nerves were pricking beneath the skin. One reason everyone round the table knew. That was the first Christina. Charles had not been at home. Shortly he would be celebrating his seventeenth birthday in Karachi; for the time being he was static and safe. Then he would start his journey home, all over-land, travelling alone, picking up rides. The whole Eliot family was there, eating the Christmas dinner, except the youngest.

The whole Eliot family, though, that was a second reason for constraint, which perhaps, I couldn’t be certain, Martin and his wife didn’t realise. They had duly arrived, with their daughter Nina, while Maurice and I were out on our afternoon walk. We hadn’t seen any of them since the summer, at Pat’s wedding, but this family party had been planned long since. So, as a matter of course, Pat and Muriel had been invited. After Muriel’s disclosures, Margaret had asked her if she still wanted the pair of them to come. Yes, Muriel replied, without expression. There they were at dinner, Muriel on my left, by this time heavily pregnant, hazel eyes sharp, face tranquil, Pat on Margaret’s left, working hard to be a social stimulant.

It was difficult to know whether anything was being given away. Once Pat tried his brand of deferential cheek on Margaret: she was polite, but didn’t play. Pat, whose antennae, always active, were specially so that night, must have known what that meant. But his father and mother did not seem to notice. Maurice tried, like a quiet impresario, to make the best of Pat’s gambits. Margaret didn’t like dissimulating, but when she was keeping a secret she was as disciplined as I was. From the other end of the table, all I could have told – if she hadn’t warned me – was that she laughed very little, and that her laughter didn’t sound free. While Pat, whose brashness was subdued, kept exerting himself to make the party bubble, Martin was attending to him, with a faint amused incredulous smile which I had seen creep on him before in his son’s company – as though astonished that anyone so unguarded could be a son of his.

By my side, Irene didn’t often meet Pat’s quick frenetic brown-eyed glance, so like her own, but instead kept me engaged with Cambridge gossip. As she did so, I heard Muriel, voice clear and precise, taking part in repartee with Pat: no sign of strain, no disquiet that I could pick up. Later, I observed her talking to Nina, her sister-in-law, inconspicuous in her parents’ presence, more so in Pat’s. She might be inconspicuous, but she was a very pretty girl, so far as one could see her face, for she had hair, in the fashion of her contemporaries, which trailed over one eye. Also in the fashion, her voice was something like a whisper, and I couldn’t hear any of her replies to Muriel. Of the two, I was judging, most men would think her the prettier: but perhaps most men would think that Muriel provoked them more.

In the drawing-room after dinner, Muriel announced that, as this was a family Christmas party, she proposed to put off her bedtime. Very dutifully, Pat argued with her – ‘Darling, you know what — (her doctor) said?’

‘He’s not here, is he?’ said Muriel, and got her way. They didn’t leave until half past eleven: it was midnight before Martin and I sat by ourselves in my study, having a final drink.

Now at last it seemed to me like an ordinary family evening, peace descending upon the room. We hadn’t talked, except with others present, all that night: nor in fact since the summer, the day of our father’s funeral. Martin proceeded to interrogate me, in the way that had become common form since we grew older. Nowadays his workaday existence didn’t change from one term to another, while mine was still open to luck, either good or bad. So that our roles had switched, and he talked to me like a concerned older brother. How was the new book going? I was well into it, I said, but it would take another year. Was there anything in this rumour about my being called into the Government? He was referring to a piece of kite-flying by one of the parliamentary correspondents –
New Recruits?

I knew no more about it than he did, I told him, and mentioned the conversation with Francis Getliffe in the Lords’ bar. This correspondent wrote as though he had been listening, or alternatively as though the House of Lords was bugged. As had happened often during my time in Whitehall, I had the paranoid feeling that about half the population of Parliament were in newspaper pay.

I had heard nothing more, I repeated to Martin. I supposed it was possible. They knew me pretty well. But it would be a damned silly thing for me to do. ‘Oh, if they do ask you, don’t turn it down out of hand,’ said Martin, watchful, tutorial, as cautious as old Arthur Brown. He went on, he could see certain advantages, and I said with fraternal sarcasm, that it was a pity he ever withdrew from the great world. Great World, I rubbed it in. We both know enough about it, partly by experience, partly by nature. Martin gave his pulled-down grin.

He would like just one more drink, he said, and went over to the sideboard. Then, as he settled back in his chair, glance turned towards his glass, he said, in a casual tone: ‘I don’t think Irene knows anything about these goings-on.’

‘What do you mean?’ It was a mechanical question. I had understood.

‘That young man of ours playing round.’ Pat’s Christian name was actually Lewis, after me, and Martin seldom referred to him by his self-given name. Suddenly Martin looked full at me with hard blue eyes.

‘I gathered you had heard,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t know.’

That seemed to give him an obscure satisfaction. Irene had never liked the marriage, although it had taken Pat off their hands, providing him with the money he had never earned.

‘Did you realise’, I asked, ‘that we knew – before tonight?’

‘Never mind that.’ He wouldn’t answer, and left me curious. He might have picked it up in the air, for he was a perceptive man. But I thought it sounded as though he had been told. By whom? He was not intimate with his daughter-in-law. Bizarre as it seemed, it was more likely to be his son. Martin felt for his son the most tenacious kind of parental love. It was, Martin knew it all by heart, so did Margaret, so did Azik Schiff, so did Mr Marsh and old Winslow long before we did, the most one-sided of human affections, the one which lasts longest and for long periods gives more pain than joy. And yet, one-sided though such a relation as Martin’s and his son’s had to be, it took two to make a possessive love. With some sons it couldn’t endure; if it did endure, there had to be a signal – sometimes the call for help – the other way. Pat had cost his father disappointment and suffering: there had been quarrels, lies, deceits: but in the midst of it all there was, and still remained, a kind of communication, so that in trouble he went back, shameless and confiding, and gave Martin a new lease of hope.

The result was that Martin, who was usually as quick as any man to see the lie in life, who had an acute nose for danger, was talking that night as though I were the one to be reassured. He did it – I had heard him speak of his son in this tone before – with an air of apparent realism. Yes, there must be plenty of young men, mustn’t there, who think of amusing themselves elsewhere in the first year of marriage. No one was ever really honest about the sexual life. How many of us made fantasies year after year? There weren’t many who would confess their fantasies, or admit or face what their sexual life had been.

I didn’t interrupt him, but he could have guessed what I was thinking. Did he remember, earlier that year in our native town, how we had talked during the murder trial? Talked without cover or excuses, unlike tonight. There was a gap between fantasy and action, the psychiatric witnesses had been comfortably saying. It was a gap that only the psychopaths or those in clinical terms not responsible managed to cross. That made life more acceptable, pushed away the horrors into a corner of their own. Martin wouldn’t accept the consolation. It was too complacent for him, he had said, as we sat in the hotel bar, talking more intimately than we had ever done.