Last Things (9 page)

Now, Martin, swirling the whisky in his glass, looked across the study from his armchair to mine.

‘I agree,’ he said, as though with fair-mindedness, ‘not so many people act out their fantasies. But still, this business of his must be fairly common, mustn’t it? You know, I’m pretty sure that I could have done the same.’

Shortly afterwards, he made an effort to sound more fair-minded still.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to face the fact that he might turn into a layabout.’

He used the objective word, his voice was sternly objective. Yet he was about as much so as Francis Getliffe complaining (with a glow of happiness concealed) that people said his son Leonard was a class better as a scientist than himself. Both of them liked to appear detached. It made Martin feel clear-minded, once he had suggested that the future might be bad. But he didn’t believe it. He was still thinking of his son as the child who had been winning, popular, anxious to make people happy – and capable of all brilliant things.

‘I thought they were getting on all right tonight, didn’t you?’ said Martin. ‘He’ll shake down when the baby is born, you know. It will make all the difference, you’ll see.’

He gave a smile which was open and quite unironic. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t have believed that he was a pessimistic man.

THE New Year opened more serenely for Margaret and me than many in the past. True, each morning as the breakfast tray came in, she looked for letters from Maurice or Charles, just as one used to in a love affair, when letters counted more. And, as in a love affair, the fact that Charles was thousands of miles away sometimes seemed to slacken his hold on her. Distance, as much as time, did its own work. Reading one of Charles’ despatches, she was relieved that he was well: but she was joyful when she heard from Maurice. Sometimes I wondered, if she and I could have had other children, whom she would have loved the most.

The flat was quiet, so many rooms empty, with us and the housekeeper living there alone. Mornings working in the study, afternoons in the drawing-room, the winter trees in the park below. Visits to Margaret’s father, back to the evening drink. Once out of the hospital, it was all serene, and there was nothing to disturb us. As for our acquaintances, we heard that Muriel was moving into Azik Schiff’s house to have her baby – Eaton Square, Azik laying on doctors and nurses, that suited him appropriately enough. Margaret kept up her visits to her, as soon as she was installed, which was towards the end of January, with the baby due in a couple of weeks.

About six o’clock one evening, the birth expected any day now, there was a ring at our hall door. As I opened it, Pat was standing on the threshold. There wasn’t likely to be a more uninvited guest. I knew there couldn’t be any news, for Margaret had not long returned from Eaton Square. He entered with his shameless smile, ingratiating and also defiant.

‘As a matter of fact, Uncle Lewis,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘I would rather like a word with Aunt Meg.’

He followed me into the drawing-room, where Margaret was sitting. She said good evening in a tone that he couldn’t have thought indulgent (it was the first time she had seen him since the Christmas dinner), but he went and kissed her cheek.

‘Do you mind’, he said, bright-faced, ‘if I help myself to a drink?’

He poured himself a whisky and soda, and then sat on a chair near to her.

‘Aunt Meg,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to ask you a favour.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to let us call this child after you.’

For once Margaret was utterly astonished, her face wide open with surprise, and yes, for an instant, with pleasure.

Her first response was uncollected. ‘Why, you don’t know whether it’s going to be a girl.’

‘I’m sure it will be.’

‘You can’t be sure–’

‘I want a girl. I want to call it after you.’

His tone was masterful and wooing. Watching with a certain amusement from the other side of the room (I had not often seen anyone try this kind of blandishment on her), I saw her eyes sharpen.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘Mine, of course, what do you think?’

Margaret’s voice was firm.

‘What does Muriel say?’

‘Oh, she’s in favour. You’d expect her to be in favour, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know, she might be.’ Margaret hadn’t altered her expression. ‘But she hasn’t quite your reasons, after all.’

‘Oh come, Aunt Meg, I just want to show how much I feel for you–’ For the first time he was protesting – as though he had just recognised that he was no longer in control.

‘When did you think this up?’

‘A long time ago, months ago, you know how you think about names.’

‘How long ago did you hear that Muriel had told me?’

‘Oh that–’

‘You don’t like being unpopular, do you?’

‘Come on, Aunt Meg, you’re making too much of it.’

‘Am I?’

He threw his head back, spread his arms, gave a wide penitential grimace, and said: ‘You know what I’m like!’

She looked at him with a frown, some sort of affection there: ‘Is that genuine?’

‘You know what I’m like, I’ve never pretended much.’

‘But, when you say that, it means you’re really satisfied with yourself, don’t you see? Of course, you want to make promises, you want us all to be fond of you again, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? But really you don’t feel there’s anything gone wrong–’

‘Now you’re being unfair.’

Even then, he wasn’t ready to be totally put down. Apologetic, yes – but, still, people did things, didn’t they? People did things that hurt her and perhaps they couldn’t help themselves. Like her father. There were others who didn’t feel as she did. Somehow Pat had discovered, it must have been from Davidson himself, that once he had applied to us for drugs. Still, he found someone else, didn’t he, said Pat, not brashly but with meaning. ‘It’s no use expecting us to be all the same.’

Margaret told him that he was making things too comfortable for himself. For a time they were talking with a curious intimacy, the intimacy of a quarrel, more than that, something like understanding. It was easy to imagine him, I thought, behaving like this to his wife when she had found him out, penitent, flattering, inventive, tender and in the end unmoved.

But Margaret didn’t give him much. Soon, she cut off the argument, She wasn’t responsible for his soul or his actions, she said: but she was responsible for any words of hers that got through to Muriel. It sounded as though she wanted to issue a communiqué after a bout of diplomatic negotiations, but Margaret knew very well what she was doing. Pat, as a source of information, particularly as a source of information about his own interests, was not, in the good old Dostoevskian phrase, a specially reliable authority. He was not, Margaret repeated, to give any version of this conversation. He was not to report that Margaret would like a girl to be called after her. Margaret herself would mention the proposal to Muriel the next time she saw her.

Pat knew the last word when he heard it. With a good grace, with a beaming doggy smile, he said, Taken as read, and helped himself to another drink. Soon afterwards, he knew also that it was time for him to go.

Did he expect to get away with it, I was speculating, not intervening, although Pat had tried to involve me once or twice. Like most bamboozlers or conmen, he assumed that no one could see through him. More often than not, bamboozlers took in no one but themselves. In fact, Margaret had seen through him from the start. Of course, the manoeuvre was a transparent one, even by his standards. He had studied how to slide back into favour; he may have thought of other peace offerings, before he decided what would please her most. Incidentally, he had chosen right. But a woman didn’t need to be as clear-sighted as Margaret to see him coming, gift in hand.

So he had, with his usual cheek, put his money down and lost it. Lost most of it, but perhaps not all. Margaret thought him as worthless as before, perhaps more so: she knew more of his tricks; he had even ceased to be interesting; and yet, despite herself, sarcastic at her own expense, she was, after that failure of his, left feeling a shade more kindly towards him.

Muriel, as usual polite and friendly, did not give away her thoughts about the baby’s name, so Margaret told me. ‘I’ve got an idea she’s made her own decision,’ said Margaret. If that were so, we never knew what it was. For the child, born a few days later, turned out to be a boy. He was to be called, Margaret heard the first time she saw him, Roy Joseph. And those names were certainly Muriel’s own decision, Margaret was sure of that. In fact, Muriel had said that she would have liked to call the boy after her stepfather, but you couldn’t use
Azik
if you weren’t a Jew. So she fell back on Roy, after her own father, and threw in Joseph, which was one of Azik’s other names.

Anyway, whatever the marriage was like, this was a fine little boy, said Margaret, and took me to see him on her next visit, when he was not yet a week old.

The first time I went inside a prosperous house in London nearly forty years earlier, I had been greeted by a butler. In Azik Schiff’s house in Eaton Square, one was also greeted by a butler. That didn’t often happen, in the London of the sixties. But even Azik, many times richer than old Mr March, couldn’t recruit the footmen and the army of maids I used to meet in the March household. Still, the Eaton Square house was grander, different in kind from those most of our friends lived in – the comfortable flats, the Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead houses of professional London. So far as that went, Azik wouldn’t have considered adequate for his purposes the politicians’ houses in Westminster, a good deal richer, that I used to know.

Azik, as he liked to announce, was fond of spending money. In the hall at Eaton Square, the carpets were deep: round the walls there were pictures which might have belonged to the antechamber of a good, though somewhat conventional, municipal gallery. That was true of Azik’s pictures throughout the house. His taste wasn’t adventurous, as Austin Davidson’s had been. Azik had bought nothing later than the Impressionists, except for one Cézanne. He had been cautious, out of character for him, perhaps not trusting either his judgment or his eye. But he had a couple of Sisleys, a Boudin, a Renoir, a Ruysdael – he might have been cautious, but we coveted them each time we went inside his house.

Getting out of the lift, which was one of Azik’s innovations, Margaret led me to the master bedroom on the third floor, the whole of which Azik had made over to his stepdaughter. Inside the high light bedroom (through the window one could see the tops of trees in the private garden), Muriel was sitting up in bed, a great four-poster bed, a wrap round her shoulders, looking childish, prim, undecorated. She said, Good afternoon, Uncle Lewis, with that old-fashioned correctness of hers, which often seemed as though she were smiling to herself or pretending to drop a curtsey.

‘It’s very good of you to come,’ she said.

I said no.

‘Aunt Margaret likes babies. It can’t be much fun for you.’

Margaret put in that I had been good, when Charles was a baby.

‘That was duty, though,’ said Muriel, looking straight at me. I was, as often, disconcerted by her, not sure whether she had a double meaning, or whether she meant anything at all.

She made some conversation about Charles, the first time I had heard her mention him. Then there was a hard raucous cry from a room close by, from what must have been the dressing-room.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said, with composure.

‘Oh, come on, let’s have him in,’ said Margaret.

‘That will be boring for Uncle Lewis, though.’

With other young women, that might have seemed coy. Not so with her. I told her that I hadn’t expected to wait so long. She gave a grin which made her look less decorous, and pressed the bell by her bedside.

As a nurse carried in the baby, Margaret said: ‘Let me have him, just for a minute.’

She pressed the bundle, arms slowly waving, to her, and looked down at him, with her expression softened by delight.

‘I do envy you,’ she said to Muriel, and from the tone I was sure that remark had been made before. Yet Margaret’s pleasure was as simple as it could be, all the life in her just joyful at the feel of life.

She passed the child to his mother, who settled him against her and said, in a clear voice: ‘Hallo, old man.’

It might have happened, it almost certainly must have happened, that my mother showed me Martin soon after he was born. But if so I had totally forgotten it, and everything to do with his birth, except that I had been sent to my aunt’s for a couple of days. No, the only days-old baby I remembered seeing was my son. The aimless, rolling eyes, the hands drifting round like an anemone’s fibrils. As a spectacle, this was the same. Perhaps the difference, to a photographic eye, was that this child, under the thin flaxen hair, had a high crown to his head, the kind of steeple crown Muriel’s father had once possessed.

But when I first saw my son it hadn’t been with a photographic eye. It hadn’t even been with emotion, but something fiercer and more animal, so strong that, though it was seventeen years ago, it didn’t need bringing back to memory; it was there. That afternoon in Muriel’s bedroom, perversely, I did watch the pair of them, mother and baby, with something like emotion, the sort of emotion which is more or less tender, more or less self-indulgent, which doesn’t trouble one. My brother’s grandson. Roy Calvert’s grandson. Would this child ever know anything about Roy Calvert, who had passed into a private mythology by now? How much did I recollect of what he had been truly like?

This child would live a different life from ours, and, of course, with any luck, live on when our concerns, and everything about us, had been long since swept away. Did one envy a life that was just beginning? Pity for what might happen, that was there. Pity was deeper than the thought he would live after one. But, yes, the impulse for life was organic; in time it would overmaster all the questions; it would prevail over pity; all one would feel was the strength of a new life.