The Malcontents (10 page)

It was a platitude, Bernard was saying, that all intellectuals could do was to act as a stimulus to the workers. The workers had to be induced to smash the social relations, and transmogrify the relations of work. It was another platitude that the relations of work were intolerable: that was the sickness of capitalist society. But the difficulty was, to persuade the workers that the relations were intolerable. Capitalism in advanced countries was much stronger than anyone thought. The real root of the problem was that it had far more hold on the workers – and, in a strict sense, a deeper understanding of them – than anything the revolutionaries had so far told them. That is where all of us, all the intellectuals, said Bernard without inflection, were stupidly romantic. Including the bodies their associates were linked with, the IS and all the rest. How do you influence and grip the workers in Western Europe, or, hardest of all, in this country or the US?

That was where the analysis didn’t exist, or had gone wrong. It was accepted that the workers in this country wouldn’t get roused about the relations of society without examples from outside. That was the intellectuals’ faith: they had all subscribed to it, he had himself. But only intellectuals were interested in examples from outside. They talked about the exploitation of the underdeveloped countries: only intellectuals without any theoretical grasp could believe that that had the remotest meaning for workers in an advanced country such as this. In their own effort, the core had made an identical mistake. Even if all had gone according to plan, they would have got nowhere. They were concerned about race. They expected their example to be picked up by the workers. That was poor thinking. The workers weren’t conceivably concerned about race. Except possibly in a negative sense. They wouldn’t react to it as well-meaning intellectuals did. Capitalism understood that. As before, capitalism had more social insight into the workers: that was why it was so strong: that was why they would need a deeper theory before it could be shaken.

Mark had anticipated anything but this, as they kept turning up and down the lawn: one could see their footprints on the winter turf. It might have been (though Mark was existing in the here-and-now, not distracted by analogies) like listening to a revolutionary in exile, detached from the point of action or his own present, utterly set upon the future. In all that Bernard had said, there had not been one word of personal experience. Mark, brushing free from his mystification, decided to intrude. As gently as when he questioned Tess about her love for Stephen, but also as directly, he asked: ‘How much has race mattered to you?’

‘That doesn’t enter.’

‘Are you sure it doesn’t?’

‘Subjective considerations only distort the picture.’

‘How much,’ said Mark, ‘have you suffered through being Jewish?’

Politely, with absolute control, Bernard answered: ‘That’s not relevant.’

Judaism was a negligible factor in the modern world, he said. He went on with his exposition. What wasn’t negligible were the relations of work in advanced society. That was where the theory had failed. They had to analyse the relations under monopoly capitalism and under socialism. It was no use being utopian or anti-industrial. How much of these relations was determined by technology? How much were they independent of the social structures? When they had better solutions of that analysis, then they could begin to speak to the workers in a meaningful language –

Impatient, springy on his feet, Mark went on listening, and, except casually, did not intervene again.

There was a good deal going on that morning. Somewhat later than the others, Stephen left home to pay his own visit. In case he was wanted (there might be any kind of news) he told his mother, who didn’t eat breakfast but had just come down, that for the next couple of hours he would be with Lance Forrester.

‘Oh, that one,’ she said without more comment.

It wasn’t often, not more than two or three times, that Stephen had been inside ‘that one’s’ flat, which was on the fifth floor of a converted Regency house, in what had once been a private road, half a mile from the university. This was a place where only an affluent young man could have afforded to live, and in fact, as Stephen saw him there, drinking coffee at a table by the window, the setting, with some qualifications, was not so very different from that of an affluent young mans at a university forty years before. True, it would have been necessary to clip his hair. The dressing-gown and sweater hadn’t been touched by fashion: forty years before, the posters might have been erotic, but probably wouldn’t have been so enthusiastically Hindu. The books, granted that an affluent young man was also raffish, hadn’t changed much:
Fanny Hill
,
Casanova
, a translation of the
Satyricon
, the old standbys – pornography had a survival value of its own. So had the texts which he was supposed to be studying,
Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility
, collections of Matthew Arnold interspersed with Anglo-Saxon grammars, standing passively on the shelf beneath. Near the bookshelves was a portable bar, doors open, displaying bottles of whisky, gin, curaçao, fruit essences – nothing that had changed with time, except for the introduction of Coca-Cola. A squash racket had been thrown down in one corner, together with gym shoes, a scarf and shorts.

Among all that, there were however two things which would have struck unfamiliar to a revenant from the thirties. Lance had, as Stephen knew, a set of rooms, this one, a bedroom, a bathroom: this window, by which he was sitting, looked over a side street and gave an airy view, across the roofs of lower houses, towards the park. It was an expensive flat. But nowadays he had no one to look after it, or to cook a meal. All that he made for himself was the morning coffee.

After finishing which, he went to a cupboard beside the bar. This was the second innovation. He brought out a reefer, saying to Stephen: ‘No use to you, I suppose?’

Stephen shook his head. So far he had said nothing but a greeting. Now, at the same moment as he caught the first whiff of the sweet and decomposing smell, he said: ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘I thought perhaps you did.’ Lance gave a matey, nonchalant grin. The skin, leathery for so young a man, was tight round his eyes and made them appear flat and saurian against his head.

He had returned to his seat at the window, and exhaled. Stephen brought up a chair and sat down opposite to him at the table. ‘Was it you?’ he asked. On the way up the New Walk, he had decided that fencing, or even watching and listening, was useless. Lance stared at him, still with a grin: ‘What’s the correct answer to that, now?’ he said.

‘Never mind whether it’s correct or not. As long as it’s true.’

‘This is all a bit sudden, you know.’

‘Just tell me, yes or no.’

‘Oh relax, man, relax.’ Lance’s tone was capricious, teasing, friendly.

‘For God’s sake, this is serious.’

‘I suppose it might be serious for anyone who says he’s done it. If that man Neil means half what he told us. Once upon a time, I shouldn’t have put it past him. So we’re in the cart whether we say yes or no, aren’t we?’

Not much missed Lance, high or not high, Stephen was compelled to recognize. He hadn’t failed to note Neil’s threats the night before, and apparently hadn’t dismissed them. Further, Stephen had a sense, maddening, tinged with envy, that Lance was keyed up by the double danger – not precisely happy nor excited because his life was running faster, but glad to have it occupied, to have nothing in front of him but the short term, with boredom, or the tasks he couldn’t or wouldn’t perform, all removed.

Stephen himself was very far from being an adventurer, and his imagination could have been taking him too far, either in feeling that that would be any adventurer’s state of mind, or that this man really was one and was existing so. ‘Mind you,’ Lance said, with an air of dispassion, ‘if we’re talking about who did it, I should be inclined to have an eye on that chap himself. I’m not quite certain, but I think that for my money he’s the one.’

Stephen said: ‘Was it you?’

He was calling on all his force of will; the other man was gazing away from him, out of the window. Stephen repeated: ‘Was it you?’

‘Oh, if you must have it,’ said Lance, ‘the answer’s no.’

He went on: ‘It wouldn’t have occurred to me, as a matter of fact. Would it to you?’

The conversation became loose, almost random, as though Stephen, having come resolved not to fence, was compelled to now. He felt quite unresolved, with nothing settled and fulfilled, jangling as in a sexual episode which had gone wrong. They talked like that, desultorily and without contact, for some time: until there was a ring at the flat bell. Lance spoke down the tube, asked who it was, pressed a button, said he was opening the door, just push and come upstairs.

‘Friend of yours,’ he said.

He couldn’t even come clean about this, Stephen thought, with another jag of irritation. Who was it, he had to ask.

‘Sylvia Ellis.’

Yes, she was a friend, Stephen had known her as long as he had known Mark or Emma. So long that, when she came in he did not see her quite as a stranger would have done. He had, somewhere in his eye or mind, a remembrance of her self-consciousness as a young girl: and, as she entered, he saw it again, while a stranger might have seen a young woman poised, firm, almost assertive. Also Stephen had watched her grow up: people now said that she was a beauty, but that wasn’t the little girl he had once played with. People of his parents’ generation went on to tell Stephen that she looked something like his mother at the same age. To an outsider, certainly, she was something of a beauty. She had a sculptured fine-drawn face with great luminous grey eyes: and there was an asymmetry or incongruity between that sensitive and nervous face and her unflimsy body, full-breasted, wide-hipped, which to some was a taunt and an attraction.

‘Sorry if I’m breaking in,’ she said.

‘Come any time,’ said Lance, with off-hand gallantry.

‘I shan’t be a minute,’ she was speaking with urgency. ‘But they told me at your house–’ she had turned to Stephen – ‘that you’d be here. I’m really looking for Mark, but I can’t find him.’

Stephen said that Mark was probably at the university, and that he would go along with her and help search for him.

‘But I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?’ Her eyes, as well as being luminous, were shrewd.

‘I think we’d about finished,’ said Stephen, in a dulled and unresilient manner.

‘It doesn’t signify a little bit,’ said Lance, whose manner by contrast was perky and free.

By this time the room was redolent with the smell of pot, and Sylvia fugitively wafted a hand in front of her face.

‘Don’t you like it, duckie?’ Lance, who hadn’t met her often, was grinning at her.

‘Not all that much.’

‘You really ought to try it some time.’ Lance began to talk to her, not so much seductively as earnestly. ‘Under careful supervision. I promise you that. It’d make all the difference in the world, you’ll find it will. You don’t know what you’re missing.’

‘What you haven’t had, you don’t miss,’ she said, as though practised in repartee with men like Lance.

‘But really. You ought to try I’ll take care of you, I guarantee. I’ve got everything here.’ He went and opened the little cupboard for her. ‘Nice acid.’ He tapped a bottle. ‘LSD to you. That can be wonderful. Sometimes one gets right outside of space and time.’

It wasn’t often that Lance was moved to eloquence. Once more, equably, she put him off.

‘I think I’d prefer to stay inside, on the whole,’ she said.

‘Oh well. No ’ard feelings?’

‘No ’ard feelings.’

Lance was still regarding her with a vestige of hope. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘I suppose it isn’t your scene, really.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t.’

‘But,’ he went on, ‘we should all like to know what is.’

‘Well then,’ said Sylvia unfussily, ‘we shall all have to wait and see, shan’t we?’

As soon as they got outside the apartment block, Sylvia said to Stephen: ‘You’re a pair of bloody fools.’

She meant himself and Mark, and she said it in a brisk comradely fashion. She continued: ‘Getting mixed up with a man like that.’

‘He had his uses–’

‘You needn’t explain. I know it all.’

Stephen looked sideways at the sculptured profile, eyes gazing steadily ahead, wondering who had broken security and confided in her. But immediately she told him that she hadn’t received information from any of them, but through her job. Her father, like Mark’s, was a manufacturer, by the town’s standards a wealthy one: she had been to a smart boarding school and to Switzerland: and then, as though not liking to compete, she hadn’t gone with the others to a university but had been trained as a secretary. She wasn’t a bad secretary, she said. As they all knew, she worked in the office of one of the town’s leading solicitors – who handled the business, so she told Stephen, of leading members of the local Conservative Party. That was how she had picked up the news. ‘I know it all,’ she said. ‘No, not quite all. But more than you possibly can.’ What was more, she had come to tell them. That meant betraying confidence, and Stephen assumed that it had taken moral effort, for she was an honourable girl. Now that she had made her resolve, though, she was doing it straightforwardly and without finicking.

Stephen had no doubt why she was doing it. It wasn’t out of regard or affection for him, though in a temperate way she had a little. It was out of love for Mark. This girl was a puzzle to most of them. She had her looks, money, intelligence: to the Freers, she would have seemed an admirable match for Stephen, far more desirable than Tess, and there had even been colloguing between the families. Sylvia had had numbers of men chasing her: Lance was one of a dozen who had tried to take her to bed, and had failed. At twenty-two (she was a few weeks older than Stephen) she was, her friends believed, still a virgin. Emma, who had been at school with her, regarded her with a mixture of derision, contempt and an element of reverence. She’s so upright, Emma jeered, as she told the others, exuding incredulity, that Sylvia didn’t ‘do that’.